DRAMATIS PERSONAE
IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER
Lucas Alaman, b. 1792—Mexican statesman and historian, Guerrero's
nemesis Ignacio Allende, b. 1769—Hidalgo's second in command Carlos de Alvear, b. 1789—an aristocrat of Buenos Aires Jose Bonifacio de Andrada, b. 1763—a Brazilian founding father;
brothers are Antonio Carlos and Martim Francisco Jose Artigas, b. 1764—federalist leader who challenged Buenos Aires Juana Azurduy, b. 1781—leader of patriot guerrillas in Upper Peru Manuel Belgrano, b. 1770—Buenos Aires revolutionary, defeated in
Upper Peru Andres Bello, b. 1781—Caracas-born man of letters, long resident in
London William Beresford, b. 1768—British officer who fought in Buenos
Aires and Portugal Sim6n Bolivar, b. 1783—the liberator of five countries Tomas Boves, b. 1782—Spanish leader of llanero lancers, defeated
Bolivar Felix Maria Calleja, b. 1753—nemesis of Hidalgo and Morelos,
eventually viceroy Carlos IV, b. 1748—king of Spain, abdicated in favor of son, Fernando VII Carlota Joaquina, b. 1775—Fernando's sister, married to Joao M of
Portugal
Javiera Carrera, b. 1771—woman of a leading Chilean patriot family Jose Miguel Carrera, b. 1785—Javiera's brother, rival of Bernardo
O'Higgins Juan Jose Castelli, b. 1764—Buenos Aires revolutionary, defeated in
Upper Peru Thomas Alexander Cochrane, b. 1775—admiral of the Chilean and
Brazilian navies Fernando VII, b. 1784—king of Spain, the "Desired One" during his
captivity Gaspar Rodr!guez de Francia, b. 1766—dictator who made Paraguay
independent Manuel Godoy, b. 1767—despised lover of the Spanish queen Vicente Guerrero, b. 1783—third major leader of rebellion in New
Spain Miguel Hidalgo, b. 1753—radical priest who began rebellion in New
Spain Alexander von Humboldt, b. 1769—Prussian scientist, explorer, and
expert Agustin de Iturbide, b. 1783—americano officer acclaimed Agustm I
of Mexico Joao VI, b. 1769—prince regent, later king, of Portugal; fled to Rio de
Janeiro Antonio de Larrazabal, b. 1769—Guatemalan leader in the Cortes
of Cadiz Ignacio Lopez Rayon, b. 1773—organizer of the Zitacuaro junta Santiago Marino, b. 1788—Venezuela's "Liberator of the East" Juan Martinez de Rozas, b. 1759—Chilean patriot leader, patron of
Bernardo O'Higgins Servando Teresa de Mier, b. 1765—dissident intellectual priest of
New Spain Francisco de Miranda, b. 1750—precursor of the cause of America Bernardo Monteagudo, b. 1785—Chuquisaca intellectual, collaborator of San Martin Juan Domingo Monteverde, b. 1772—Spanish general who defeated
Miranda Carlos Montufar, b. 1780—companion of Humboldt, son of Juan P10 Juan Pio Montufar, b. 1759—head of 1809 Quito junta Jose Maria Morelos, b. 1765—second major leader of rebellion in
New Spain Mariano Moreno, b. 1778—secretary of first Buenos Aires junta
Pablo Morillo, b. 1778—Spanish general who led reconquest of New
Granada Antonio Narino, b. 1765—conspirator, then patriot leader of New
Granada Bernardo O'Higgins, b. 1778—liberator of Chile, collaborator of San
Martin Manuel Ascencio Padilla, b. 1775—patriot leader of Upper Peru Jose Antonio Paez, b. 1790—Bolivar's llanero ally and later his rival Pedro I, b. 1798—son of Joao VI and Carlota Joaquina, declared Brazilian independence Manuel Carlos Piar, b. 1774—pardo general executed by Bolivar Home Popham, b. 1762—British admiral who attacked Buenos Aires
in 1806 Mateo Pumacahua, b. 1740—Indian leader of 1814 Cuzco rebellion Andres Quintana Roo, b. 1787—patriot intellectual of New Spain Bernardino Rivadavia, b. 1780—liberal president of independent
Buenos Aires Simon Rodriguez (aka Samuel Robinson), b. 1771—revolutionary
educator Manuela Saenz, b. 1793—patriot of Quito, collaborator of Bolivar Mariquita Sanchez, b. 1786—Buenos Aires revolutionary (later
Madame Mendeville) Francisco de Paula Santander, b. 1792—Bolivar's rival in New
Granada Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, b. 1794—young caudillo, helped topple Agustin I Jose de San Mart!n, b. 1778—liberator who bowed out at Guayaquil Antonio Jose de Sucre, b. 1795—Bolivar's right-hand man in the
1820s Leona Vicario, b. 1789—organizer in Mexico City's patriot underground Duke of Wellington, b. 1769—Napoleon's British nemesis in Spain
x Dramatis Personae
VICEROYS
IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE
GALLERY
OF THE PRINCIPAL DRAMATIS PERSONAE
BELGRANO CARLOTA
BOLIVAR
JOAO VI GUEMES
GUERRERO
TURBIDE HIDALGO HUMBOLDT LARRAZABAJ
MEJIA
MORELOS
PAEZ
MIRANDA MORENO NARINO PEDRO
PIAR
RODRIGUEZ
SANCHEZ
SAN MARTIN
WELLINGTON VICARIO
CHRONOLOGY
1799 Humboldt begins his travels in America
1806 Renegade invasions at Buenos Aires and Coro
1807 Napoleon's troops enter Iberian Peninsula Portuguese crown flees Lisbon for Brazil
1808 Spanish crown falls into Napoleon's hands
Crisis of the Spanish monarchy begins; juntas form in Spain Cabildo abierto in Mexico City, Iturrigaray deposed
1809 Central Junta coordinates Spanish resistance to Napoleon Napoleon completes conquest of Spain except for Cadiz Who should rule in America? Debate proliferates
Small rebellions in the Andes: Chuquisaca, La Paz, Quito
1810 Cortes and Regency established in Cadiz
Juntas formed in Caracas, Buenos Aires, Bogota, and Santiago First army sent by Buenos Aires to Upper Peru Hidalgo's multitude sweeps through New Spain
1811 Miranda declares an independent republic in Venezuela Civil war begins in Venezuela, New Granada, and Chile Hidalgo captured and executed; Morelos takes over Forces of Buenos Aires defeated in Paraguay, Upper Peru Peru becomes base for Spanish reconquest of Andes British and Portuguese forces retake Portugal from Napoleon
1812 Napoleon's grip on Spain loosens as well
The Cortes of Cadiz promulgates a liberal constitution
The first Venezuelan republic collapses Morelos survives Cuautla, captures Oaxaca
1813 Bolivar declares "War to the Death" Buenos Aires again defeated in Upper Peru Morelos loses momentum besieging Acapulco
1814 Fernando VII restored, annuls 1812 constitution, dissolves cortes
Spanish forces from Peru reconquer Chile Defeated by Boves, Bolivar leaves for exile
1815 Major reconquest force arrives from post-Napoleonic Spain Artigas confederation united against Buenos Aires
Joao VI's United Kingdom makes Brazil equal to Portugal Morelos captured and executed
1816 Spanish reconquest of America complete, except for Rio de la Plata
1817 San Martin crosses the Andes from Mendoza to Chile Bolivar's comeback begins in Venezuela Pernambucan rebellion reveals "liberal contagion" in Brazil
1818 Guerrero renews the spirit of rebellion in New Spain San Martin prepares his assault on Lima
1819 Bolivar wins at Boyaca Bridge, controls New Granada
1820 Constitutionalist revolutions in Spain and Portugal Major Spanish reconquest expedition aborted
San Martin's seaborne invasion of Peru begins
1821 Cortes of Lisbon forces Joao VI's return to Portugal Iturbide and Guerrero join under the Plan de Iguala, enter Mexico City
Central America joins the Plan de Iguala, declares independence
Bolivar wins at Carabobo, while San Martin bogs down in Peru
1822 Prince Pedro declares Brazil independent, crowned emperor Iturbide acclaimed emperor Agustin I of independent Mexico Bolivar and San Martin meet in Guayaquil
1823 Absolutist counterrevolutions seize both Spain and Portugal Agustin I overthrown, Mexico becomes a republic Bolivar's Peruvian campaign begins
1S24 Pedro I consolidates power in the Brazilian Empire Battle of Ayacucho, final Spanish defeat in America
\\ Chronology
Americanos
PROLOGUE: WHY AMERICANOS?
Long live the Sovereign People! Our time has come at last. . .
— "Cancion americana," 1797
Why Americanos, without capitalization? Why America —as will be written here—with an accent mark? Americanos are, after all, simply the people of America. America is the same word in Spanish or Portuguese and English, one could say. And yet it isn't. For Latin Americans, America has never been synonymous with the United States, nor are americanos simply Americans, and the distinction becomes important in the story told here. Therefore, in this book, America will be used to mean what we today call, in English, Latin America, including all the lands colonized by Spain and Portugal. The americanos in these pages are speakers of Spanish or Portuguese, not English.
America and americanos were key terms in Latin America's independence struggles. Until 1807-8, when Napoleonic invasions of Portugal and Spain unleashed a crisis in America, americano was a term generally denoting whites only. But by the time the dust settled in
1825, years of bloodshed had transformed the meaning of americano, stretching the term around people of indigenous and African and mixed descent, the large majority of the population. The transformation had happened as patriot generals, poets, and orators described their struggle as "the cause of America" and called all americanos to join it. The lyrics of the "Cancion americana" of 1797, anthem of a revolutionary conspiracy in Venezuela, exemplify the new meaning at an early date: "Our homeland calls, americanos, / Together we'll destroy the tyrant." 1
The patriot language of America only exceptionally applied the terms of identity— mexicano, venezolano, colombiano, chileno, brasileiro, guatemalteco, pernano, and so on—associated with today's Latin American nations. From modern Mexico to Argentina and Chile, the patriots of Latin America's struggle for independence constructed a binary divide separating all americanos, on one hand, from europeos (Europeans, meaning European-born Spaniards), on the other. This might seem unremarkable at first. After all, what more obvious separation than the one created by the Atlantic Ocean? Had not the United States already established an analogous American identity?
To the contrary, the semantic evolution of the word amerkano marks a pivotal moment in world history, something no less momentous than had occurred in the English colonies of America decades earlier. The most obvious social distinctions in colonial America did not divide americanos from europeos at all. The colonization of America had created starkly hierarchical societies organized by a caste system. Indians, free people of African descent, and various mixed-race castes differed far more from the white americano ruling class than did americanos from europeos. To summarize the process that we are about to trace in detail, the overwhelmingly white patriot leadership embraced the new, broader meaning of americano because that maximized their chance of victory against the mother country. If everyone born in America—everyone in the strongly variegated population that had arisen from the mingling of individuals from three continents— was an americano, and if all were on the same side, the tiny minority of European-born Spaniards (less than 1 percent of the population) did not stand a chance of maintaining colonial rule. To define Americas rainbow of castes as the americano people recognized the truth on the ground, but it also created a new truth, an airy but potent abstraction. That abstraction was the Sovereign People, who deserved nothing less than a government "of, by, and for the People." And, unlike what had occurred with the independence of the United States in the 1780s, the
. imeriamos
Sovereign People of America who emerged in the 1820s included a nonwhite majority.
The more or less simultaneous creation of a dozen independent nations in America was therefore momentous in a manner that U.S. independence was not. Both signaled important future directions in world decolonization. U.S. independence certainly modeled the creation of a new republic in what had been a European colony, and it inspired a number of influential americano patriots. But one event does not constitute a trend, and people of non-European descent were largely excluded from the U.S. republican model. The creation of the United States of America embodied basic claims of self-determination only for people of purely European descent. In contrast, the mass production of aspiring nation-states in America, in the following generation, did constitute a trend and clearly established a template for future decolonization.
The americanos followed the U.S. example, embodying popular sovereignty in a written constitution produced by a nationally elected constituent assembly. But the new template departed from the U.S. example by formally including large populations of indigenous, African, and mixed descent as citizens in that process. (Haiti, it must be recognized, had really pioneered this innovation, but it started no trends, being an example much more feared than imitated by upper-class political leaders in America.) The americano version was imperfect, to say the least. Citizenship for everyone remained more theoretical than real for many decades. Nonetheless, the independence of America meant that the Western Hemisphere belonged to republics. So claimed the U.S. Monroe Doctrine in 1823, and over the course of the nineteenth century americanos made that vision a reality. By the time that European colonies in Africa and Asia gave way after World War II, the successful decolonization of Latin America had become an established, if still connective, fact of global history. Americano success ensured the currency of the constitutional, republican template in the new African and Asian nations that proliferated in the second half of the twentieth century. The general dissemination of the model had its limits, obviously. Still, it constituted a truly global triumph of the ideas that U.S. parlance these days often calls "Western" political values, ideas that the rest of the world tends to call liberalism.
In fact, the word liberal was coined in Spain during the fight against Napoleon, to describe Spanish patriots whose banner was liberty. Liberals were, in their own terms, enemies of servitude. They stood for constitutional government with the guarantee of civil liberties
Prologue: Why Americanos?
and for a free market of both goods and ideas, which no official truth, no one group or interest or opinion, should ever dominate totally. The starting point of their political thinking—provoked, as we shall see, by the shocking eclipse of the Spanish crown—was popular sovereignty.
In order to theorize popular sovereignty, it was necessary to define the Sovereign People, which meant defining the nation. And the new nations of America were defined from the outset to include people of indigenous, African, and mixed descent. This process of national self-definition involved some tactical denial and self-delusion, and yet it was, if anything, an even more significant americano contribution to world history than the dissemination of liberal republicanism. Benedict Anderson's influential book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism emphasizes the role in that global process of "Creole pioneers"—by which he means the very people whom I call (and who called themselves) americanos. Anderson gives far too little importance to the wars of independence as formative experiences in America, but he has helped a generation of scholars see Latin American independence as a pivotal moment in the global development of nationalism.
Americanos is not the term used, most commonly, by histories of Latin American independence written in English. Instead, they call American-born whites "Creoles"—a translation of the Spanish word criollo (hence Anderson's "Creole pioneers" of world nationalism). Americanos is a better term because it clarifies the crucial extension of the definition of Sovereign People from whites only to anyone born in America.
Historians of Latin America view the significance of 1808-182 5 in widely divergent ways. Patriotic history (historia patria) in each country has provided mythic narratives of exemplary heroes and foundational acts, narratives of the sort that configure national identities around the world. Artigas, Andrada, Belgrano, Bolivar, Guerrero, Hidalgo, Miranda, Morelos, O'Higgins, Paez, Pedro I, San Martin, Sucre, and Santander—a sampling of americano leaders—are the protagonists of historia patria. They are the names of cities, parks, states, and avenues, unquestionably names to know for anyone who wants to understand the independence of America. But in the patriotic imagination, these heroes are also great men or women whose superior intelligence, virtue, and bravery are held up for inspiration and imitation. That is not the approach taken here. For me, these heroes are inspiring not because they were perfect but because they weren't.
. [meriamas
Current historiography on Latin America asks above all what impact independence had on the colonial hierarchies, particularly on the relationship between the ruling white minority and the subjugated majority of African and indigenous descent. Because colonial hierarchies eroded only slowly in independent America, academic historians have tended to stress the disappointing outcomes of independence. Republics, after all, were supposed to be societies in which the Sovereign People consisted of equal citizens. Slavery and peonage were fundamentally incompatible with republicanism, although the incompatibility could be finessed for decades, as in the United States. The main patriot movements had committed themselves rhetorically to ending the caste stratification so prevalent in America. But rhetorical commitments do not always hold, and after independence republican ideals were sorely tested.
These independence struggles produced unified nations where the rule of law prevailed unerringly, where all enjoyed equal citizenship, where republican governments represented general interests, only in theory. In fact, "Western" political values have had a troubled history in Latin America (as in the rest of the world, including Europe) because they conflicted with deeply held values and habits that preceded them. Indeed, Western political values have been both powerfully championed and stubbornly resisted in America. By demanding their right to self-determination, americanos defined the direction of world history two hundred years ago, but their bids for effective citizenship were usually defeated before the twentieth century. That part of the story is best left for the epilogue.
This book is different from straight patriotic and scholarly tellings of Latin American independence. The purpose here is to weave together patriotic names to know with a balanced assessment of events in a unified narrative covering the whole region colonized by Spain and Portugal. Portuguese America (Brazil) plays a less important part than does Spanish America, which was a more populous place and one in which the process of independence was more complex, producing a score of modern countries. Yet the same general forces were at work everywhere in America. Let us begin with the following ironic and infrequently made point. Overall, americanos were loyal to their king and not especially eager to embrace revolutionary ideas emanating from the United States and France when, in 1799, one of the most remarkable travelers in history landed on their shores. That traveler, a Prussian named Alexander von Humboldt, an outsider of insatiable curiosity, can be our tour guide in late colonial America.
Prologue: Why Americanos?
DISCOVERING AMERICA
i799-1805
In 1799, travel accounts were the basic source of information about America for readers in Europe and the fledgling United States. In that year, Alexander von Humboldt, surely the most influential traveler ever to visit America, began his famous journey through territories that remained little known to the outside world. Humboldt never used the name Latin America, because it did not yet exist and would not, in fact, during the entire period covered by this book. Within a very few years after Humboldt's visit, America would give birth to a dozen new nations in a painful labor. But none of that was evident in 1799.
Humboldt and Bonpland Discover America
Alexander von Humboldt—would-be explorer, all-purpose scientist, guy who liked guys—was twenty-nine years old when he first set foot in the New World in July 1799. You have to love the young Humboldt: the odd boy who liked bugs too much to be a bureaucrat, as his mother wished; the twenty-year-old who went to Paris for the delirious first anniversary of the French Revolution and worked for a few days as a volunteer helping construct the city's Temple of Liberty for the celebration. Imagine him as the dedicated graduate student of geology and botany who wanted above all to explore the world outside of Europe.
Consider him the cocky Berliner whose excellent Spanish convinced the king of Spain to let him into America when few outsiders were allowed to visit there.
Or you may prefer not to like Humboldt, who, after all, reeked of privilege. He was the sort of kid whose family had a castle, the sort who could afford to bankroll his own five-year scientific expedition. This lanky young German whose democratic principles failed to banish his air of superiority was too good-looking by half. And Humboldt was quite definitely a know-it-all. He represents both the bright and dark sides of the European intellectual and scientific quickening called the Enlightenment. The pure, raw joy of comprehending the universe
Colonial America
Saint Domingue
(French)
►Chuquisaca
| • ^ Sao Paulo
. Potosi\
Santiago? » Buenos^ */ Brazil
io de Janeiro
(Portuguese)
Rio de la Plata
Discovering America J
pulsed palpably in the young Humboldt. Darwin said Humboldt's Personal Narrative (the journal of the trip that took him to Venezuela and Cuba, the Andes, and Mexico) was his great inspiration. But Humboldt also exemplified the Enlightenment's will to mastery. To "discover" the world was to access it. Classification, one of the Enlightenment's intellectual passions and one of Humboldt's, was a technology of control. Not by accident was Humboldt one of the most famous men in Europe during the great age of European global colonization.
Humboldt received permission from Carlos IV to travel collecting specimens of plants, animals, and minerals, measuring winds and currents, altitudes and latitudes. He would pursue all elements of natural history, a name for the integrated study of the changing earth, most especially the interactive relationship between living things and their environment. Because a French scientist who visited South America in 1735 had heard rumors of a channel connecting the Amazon and Orinoco river systems, Humboldt would canoe for more than a thousand miles through the rain forest searching for the connection. And he would repeatedly satisfy his penchant to climb up any volcano he found and then descend into its crater to investigate choking ash, gurgling lava, and invisible plumes of deadly gases firsthand.
Humboldt and his colleague Aime de Bonpland were originally headed for Cuba. But typhoid fever broke out aboard their ship off the coast of Venezuela, and Humboldt and Bonpland decided to land at the first opportunity. That opportunity was an ancient and somewhat forgotten Caribbean port called Cumana, the oldest Spanish settlement on the South American continent—at that time partly in ruins because of a recent earthquake. Fortunately, the Spanish governor of Cumana was a Francophile intellectual who actively applauded Humboldt and Bonpland and seemed eager to facilitate their explorations in all ways. The earth around Cumana was alive as only the tropical earth can be, "powerful, exuberant, serene," Humboldt wrote his brother in a deliriously happy letter. 1 Life aboard ship had suited him, he reported, and he had spent much of the time on deck taking astronomical readings and hauling up samples of seawater for analysis. Not mentioning any typhoid fever on his voyage for fear of alarming his brother, the ecstatic twenty-nine-year-old instead raved about tigers, parrots, monkeys, armadillos, birds, and fish in spectacular colors, coconut palms, and "semi-savage Indians, a beautiful and interesting race." 2 The weather in this tropical paradise seemed to suit him, too. Setting foot in the tropics excited Humboldt and Bonpland to the point that they could not carry on a coherent conversation for several
0 Americanos
days, so rapidly did each marvel supersede the last. Venezuela was rife with species unknown to Western science. And for a few coins, one could rent a house with servants for a whole month. Nearby Caracas, Humboldt assured his brother, had one of the healthiest climates in America. So he was changing his plan. He and Bonpland would spend some months in Venezuela before proceeding to Cuba. The rumored approach of British warships made that plan doubly prudent, because Spain and Britain were at war.
Meanwhile, a daily slave market outside the window of his new house spoiled Humboldt's visions of paradise. Humboldt and Bonpland found the view heart-rending and "odious." Humboldt despised slavery, and he wrote in fury to his brother about seeing buyers force people's "mouths open as we do with horses in the market." 3 The two men would see many, many slaves on the shores of the Caribbean. Only one spot was free of slavery: France's former sugar colony Saint-Domingue, modern Haiti, where the spirit of the French Revolution had helped a slave rebellion become a revolution that destroyed slavery utterly and wiped out the white master class along with it. Cuba, Humboldt's next planned destination, was Spain's great experiment in slave-driven plantation agriculture. And slavery was only one of many social injustices that European colonization had brought in its train.
Yet Humboldt later wrote that during the 1799-1805 trip that made his reputation, he did not anticipate the tempestuous movements for independence that began shortly after his return to Europe. Why not? The British colonies of North America had recently won their independence from Britain. Haiti had won independence from France. Neither Spanish America nor Brazil was strongly garrisoned by European forces. Add to that the resentments of colonial merchants limited by the Spanish monopoly trading system. Factor in the frustration of American-born Spaniards because of the colonial government's constant favoritism toward the European-born. Apply the anger and humiliation of the downtrodden black and brown people who constituted three-quarters of the population, occupying all the lower rungs on the colonial caste system in Spain's America. With all that, a pervasive desire for decolonization might seem a foregone conclusion. Humboldt saw no great love for Spain, and he found a few people who seemed surprisingly proud of being called americanos. But how ripe for revolution was America, really?
In 1800, America as a whole showed few revolutionary inclinations. Humboldt traversed America's major population centers (including three of its four viceregal capitals, Lima, Bogota, and Mexico City), its
Amazonian lowlands, the Caribbean basin, the Andean highlands, and much of Spain's most important colony, New Spain. Here is the situation he encountered. European-born Spaniards, called espanoles europeos (europeos for short), were less than i percent of the population of America. On the other hand, American-born Spaniards, espanoles amer-icanos (americanos for short) accounted for roughly a quarter of the population. Europeos acted far superior to their americano cousins. In addition, the royal government and the church preferred europeos over americanos for employment and office holding—an old and angry grievance of the americanos. Moreover, the richest and best-connected merchants—virtually all those who carried on transatlantic commerce—were invariably europeos. Jealous americanos regarded prosperous europeos as heartless money-grubbers and condescending, would-be aristocrats. Resentment of europeos found voice in unflattering epithets, most notably the names chapetdn and gachnpin. Both europeos and americanos felt superior to, and lived by subjugating, the roughly three-quarters of the population whose descent was at least partly African or indigenous American. However much arrogant europeos got on their nerves, americanos anxiously affirmed their shared Spanishness in contrast to the Africans, Indians, and mixed-bloods who occupied the lower rungs of the caste hierarchy. The majority of the population lived in the great frontiers and hinterlands of America, along tropical rivers, in rain forest clearings, on Andean slopes, outside any effective government control, preoccupied with farming or fishing and supplying their own needs in whatever way possible. America's sprawling frontiers could easily provide subsistence for many times the region's population. Only in rare cases was hunger a motive for rebellion.
The 1780s had seen tax rebellions in several parts of America, but only one of them, the Tupac Amaru rebellion of Peru and Upper Peru (today Bolivia), was really threatening. These rebellions generally expressed localized grievances and demanded limited reforms. Their rallying cry was usually something like "Long live the king and death to bad government!" Often they were responses to royal policies that limited economic activities in the colonies. These policies had not gone away. True, some exceptions had been made to the official Spanish trade monopoly, whereby Spanish merchants normally had exclusive rights to buy and sell in the seaports of America, but it had not been abolished. One way or another, however, the moment of colonial rebelliousness had passed by 1800, when Humboldt observed mat most people, including (white) americanos, Indians, mixed-bloods, and
10 Americanos
blacks, expressed overwhelmingly loyalty to the Spanish crown. To a young man imbued with the spirit of revolutionary transformation, the people of America seemed, overall, rather apathetic.
More than internal discontent an external clash between European empires was causing colonial disruption in 1800. Spain and Britain had been often at war in the eighteenth century. Colonial militias had been formed to defend America against British intrusions on land, but the British navy ruled the waves. Colonial goods piled up on the docks and passengers found no passage, as all communications were paralyzed by British warships operating from island bases in the Caribbean. Trinidad, a formerly Spanish island, had become the most recent of these. When Humboldt and Bonpland finally emerged from the rain forest to take ship for Cuba, they found that Spanish ships dared not sail along the Venezuelan coast. Humboldt and Bonpland had to wait four months in Venezuela for a smuggling skiff that served the pent-up Venezuelan demand for British goods by shuttling between Trinidad and the mainland. And no sooner had they put to sea than marauding Nova Scotia privateers (pirates working as military contractors, so to speak, for Britain) swooped down on them. Humboldt and Bonpland found themselves deposited aboard a British naval sloop. Fortunately, the British captain, who had read about their scientific expedition, politely delivered them back to Venezuela, where they continued to wait in vain for a Spanish ship to take them to Cuba. Finally, they had to take passage on a neutral U.S. cargo vessel carrying tons of foul-smelling beef jerky.
Consider a Continent of Frontiers
Beef jerky is made by piling salt-slathered meat in the sun. The salt and heat suck the moisture out of the rapidly decomposing flesh, halting the process before it is too far advanced. Jerky was a product of cattle frontiers all over America. In the era before refrigeration, jerking beef was the only way of more or less preserving it for shipment overseas. High in protein, rich in flavor, jerked beef was principally a ration for sailors and, above all, slaves—the reason that Humboldt's boat full of jerky was bound for Cuba. The shipment that made Humboldt and Bonpland hold their noses may have originated on the Orinoco cattle frontier of Venezuela or much farther south.
Aside from a fringe of coastal settlements, most of South America remained a frontier in 1800. In fact, the population of the whole
continent at the time would probably fit into a metropolis such as Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, or Mexico City today. Humboldt and Bonpland had a special interest in America's vast frontiers, where they hoped to discover species new to European science. In November 1800, though, the two intrepid explorers were headed to relatively tame and well-known Cuba, so we will visit another frontier without them. Across the continent, on the grassy plains of America's south Atlantic coast, a Spanish officer named Felix de Azara was thinking about the Rio de la Plata frontier, land of the fabled cowboys called gauchos.
The Rio de la Plata frontier was an endless, mostly treeless plain where hundreds of thousands of half-wild horses and cattle roamed free. This frontier was home to highly mobile indigenous people, comparable to the Apache or Sioux, who had learned to ride and hunted the feral cattle instead of bison. To colonizers such as Azara, this frontier was a resource to be secured for Spain. Though much older than Humboldt and no democrat, Azara resembled the Prussian in his habit of constantly observing, analyzing, and taking notes. He was about to write a famous report to the Spanish crown. Azara, his report, and his assistant, Jose Artigas, illustrate something about the coming wars of independence. On the eve of those wars, revolt was the last thing on people's minds in America as a whole. When events in Europe involved americanos in international conflict against the French, against the British, they reacted as loyal subjects of their king.
Felix de Azara had first come to America as part of the Spanish team sent to survey and mark a border between Spanish and Portuguese claims. The Rio de la Plata frontier was the one part of America where Spanish and Portuguese claims clashed substantially, though, and when negotiations collapsed, Azara stayed to advance the royal project in a different way—by populating the frontier with loyal, armed Spanish subjects. To secure the frontier against the Portuguese, Azara advised the Spanish government to found a string of towns and distribute land for free in ranch-size portions to men who agreed to occupy the ranch with their families, maintain a shotgun, and serve in the militia. The Portuguese had used that model very successfully. Azara recommended that Portuguese settlers willing to live under Spanish rule should be encouraged to set a good example for the Spanish settlers.
The Spanish-speaking population of the Rio de la Plata frontier did not impress Azara. Possibly half passed as espanoles americanos, he reckoned, but many actually had some Indian ancestry The others included pardos (people of mixed European and African descent), Guar-anf Indians from the nearby Jesuit missions, and a few African slaves.
12 . Imericanos
The americanos did not hesitate to work alongside pardos, Guarani, or even slaves, so long as that work was done on horseback. Few in the Plata countryside owned land, but everyone had horses. Azara made fun of the frontiersmen's dress, including a Guarani loincloth called a chiripd, worn by whites, pardos, and slaves because it was ideal for riding horseback. Grown to manhood on the violent frontier, lamented Azara, these gauchos killed each other "as calmly as one cuts the throat of a cow." 4
Azara wrote in great disgust that the herds of the Plata frontier had been decimated during the 1700s by the thoughtlessness of Spanish cattle hunters who launched their expeditions in the spring, when many calves died needlessly in the confusion. The Charrua Indians— who, unlike the Guarani, had not accepted Christianity-competed for cattle, of course. Cattle were their subsistence. But the Spanish cattle hunters took cattle by the tens and hundreds of thousands, not for subsistence but for their hides, the only part of them that could be profitably exported to Europe. The carcasses of these animals, roughly eight hundred thousand a year in the previous twenty years, were almost all left to rot on the plains. Azara estimated that properly managed herds would grow to almost ninety million cattle in three decades and produce enough beef jerky for all the slaves in Cuba.
Azara was fortunate to have as his assistant a local military officer who knew the Rio de la Plata frontier and its people intimately, maybe even a little too intimately for Azara's taste. Captain Jose Artigas was the sort who went by a nickname, Pepe, and in the presence of gaucho frontiersmen acted very much like them. The europeo Azara was not particularly good at dealing with gauchos, but the americano Artigas had no equal at it, making him helpful indeed. Artigas came from a family well established on the frontier. Both his father and his grandfather had captained the mounted militia of the frontier charged with protecting ranchers and cattle hunters from heathen Indians such as the Charrua. Artigas had left home to try his luck on the plains at the age of fourteen. He became one of those americanos who joined cattle-hunting expeditions and mingled with gauchos, to Azara's distress. He stayed out on the grasslands for many months at a time, roaming throughout the upper Rio de la Plata plains. His home base during this period was an old mission settlement called Soriano, full of Indians and mixed-blood mestizos such as plucky Isabel Velasquez, who bore Artigas four children. Pepe and Isabel had not been able to marry, presuming that his family would have allowed it, because she already had a husband in prison.
Young Artigas had been accused of driving contraband herds of two thousand cattle between the Spanish and Portuguese settlements. He was on good terms with both the Portuguese and the Charrua Indians and had an enthusiastic following among the multihued Spanish-speaking gaucho riffraff of the countryside. In 1795, the governor of Montevideo, Spain's fortified port city on the edge of the Rio de la Plata frontier, issued a warrant for the arrest of the accused contraband herdsman. However, the Buenos Aires viceroy, who was the foremost Spanish authority in the Rio de la Plata, soon offered Artigas an amnesty and recruited him to head a new mounted police force. Overnight, to the delight of his family, the budding renegade underwent an extreme transformation and became a militia captain like his father and grandfather. Artigas was expected to focus on contraband and on the Charrua, two subjects that he had evidently mastered. But Artigas proved notably ineffective at killing Charruas. Other commanders excelled at surprising Charrua encampments and slaughtering men, women, and children, while Artigas seemed unable or unwilling to attack his former companions.
One day Jose Artigas would make war on Spain and become the father of his country, the republic of Uruguay. But in 1801 he was a loyal—if "Indian-loving" and, until lately, not particularly well-behaved—military officer of Carlos IV, the king of Spain.
Humboldt's Adventure Continues
Humboldt spent only two months in Cuba. Its position astride major sea routes had made Cuba well known, and it was not a land of uncharted terrain and undiscovered creatures to be classified by genus and species, as were parts of the Amazon basin. A perpetual target for English raids, Cuba had become, in Humboldt's day, the great economic success story of America. So Humboldt did no exploring and instead made the collection of statistics on demography, agriculture, trade, and government finance his main activity during his two-month stay in Cuba. The primary object of his attention was chattel slavery.
After returning to Europe, he would use the materials he collected to argue that slavery was uneconomical as well as obviously immoral. People in the future, he predicted correctly, would have trouble believing that the routine inhumanity of slavery as then practiced in Havana (or Washington, D.C., or Rio de Janeiro) was once accepted as normal. "Slavery is without doubt the greatest of all evils to have plagued
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mankind," he wrote in what proved to be one of the most quoted passages of his voluminous travel account. 5 Humboldt's argument was superbly informed. He recorded how the indigenous people of Cuba had been entirely destroyed by the late 1500s, how the island remained a sparsely populated hide-producing frontier zone in the 1600s. Not until the British occupied Havana in 1762, opening the door for British slave traders, did the Cuban economy begin to take off. The spreading cane fields of the 1780s and 1790s made western Cuba an agricultural dynamo. By the time Humboldt and Bonpland arrived, thousands of chained Africans passed through the Havana customs house yearly, with a steady upward trend, and the number for the whole island, including contraband slaves, was much higher. Cuban slave owners imported tons of jerked beef, and many Havana streets stank of it. Slave imports and sugar exports generated millions of dollars annually in tax revenues, and free-spending Havana sugar planters were becoming conspicuous in French, Spanish, and Italian cities.
Fortunately for Spain, Cuba's slave-driven economy made Cuban plantation owners extremely conservative and, in the light of events in nearby Haiti, particularly reluctant to condone rebellious behavior. For that reason—and also because Cuba was fantastically profitable, powerfully garrisoned, and absolutely central to Spanish military strategy in America—Spain's "Ever Faithful Isle," as Cuba came to be called, did not participate in the revolutionary events about to unfold on the mainland.
Their curiosity satisfied, Humboldt and Bonpland returned to the South American mainland at Cartagena and, during June and July 1801, ascended the powerful Magadalena River in what is today Colombia. Their goal was to explore a different face of America, the Andean highlands. Like the highlands of New Spain (modern Mexico) and Guatemala, the lofty plateaus of the Andes mountains had supported relatively dense populations of village-dwelling indigenous farmers for thousands of years before the European invasion. These were not frontiers, but rather the opposite: the core areas of Spanish colonization in America.
Before steam navigation, ascending the Magdalena River was a grueling process. Teams of boatmen, almost always men of African descent, pushed the craft upstream against the strong current using long poles, keeping to the shallows along the bank where the current ran less swiftly (but the tropical sun beat down just as hard). To reach Bogota from the coast took six weeks on the river and then another three weeks climbing up something that more resembled a mountain
streambed than a road. There were no alternative routes. Humboldt took the opportunity to study the several species of alligators, trying to determine their relationship to Nile crocodiles. When the two scientists finally arrived in Santa Fe de Bogota, capital of the Viceroyalty of New Granada, the scientific and intellectual community gave them a grand welcome. But Bonpland's health had been undermined by the tribulations of the journey. For a European, the chilly mists of Bogota at eight thousand feet seemed more congenial and inviting than the steaming lowlands of the Caribbean coast. So the two men settled in for a four-month respite, much of which they spent in the library of Jose Celestino Mutis, one of the first Spanish scientists to apply the Linnaean botanical classification system.
In Bogota, Humboldt found a city locked inside layers of soaring, steep-sloped mountains where, then as now, roads were hard to construct. New Granada appears to have been, by Humboldt's comparison with Cuba, something of a colonial disappointment. Though populous and enormous, it generated little wealth for Spain. The presence of highland farming Indians (and hoards of gold objects) had drawn the Spanish conquerors to the high plateau of Cundinamarca, the location of Bogota, but for now, those farms could grow nothing that could be exported profitably to Europe. The jagged geography of the northern Andes made only the most valuable substances, such as gold, worth transporting to the coast. Anything less precious than gold would not pay for itself. This fact made most of New Granada's rural population a subsistence peasantry, sprinkled through jumbled ridges and valleys, clustering around small, widely separated cities, interspersed with small indigenous groups and steep stretches of trackless wilderness. There were some sugar and slaves around Cartagena on the Caribbean coast and along the Cauca River, but nothing to compare with Cuba.
Therefore, the Viceroyalty of New Granada mattered less to the Spanish crown than did its other three American viceroyalties. The Viceroyalty of Peru and the Viceroyalty of New Spain, with their great silver mines, were richer and better established. The Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata got more royal attention because of the ongoing competition with the Portuguese in the vicinity. But the high Cundinamarca plateau around Bogota was remarkably lush and beautiful, and the fabulous botanical collection assembled by Mutis made the visit worthwhile in itself. Furthermore, New Granada abounded in something Humboldt especially adored, volcanoes. As soon as Bonpland felt ready to hike, the two were on the road again, traveling south through the Andes toward Lima, climbing every volcano on the way Ahead, looming
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over the city of Quito, which Humboldt found lovely but overly solemn with its cold and cloudy skies, stood the great snow-capped volcano called Pichincha. Humboldt climbed Pichincha in the company of an Indian guide. At one point, he and the guide found themselves walking on an ice bridge over part of the yawning crater, its circumference many miles around. Humboldt had such a good time that he convinced Bonpland and Carlos Montufar, a new friend, son of a local noble, to climb Pichincha with him again two days later. All three then tried their luck on Chimborazo, a volcano that towered over all the others. Humboldt climbed six snow-capped volcanoes around Quito, impressing some highlanders and mystifying others. Scaling Chimborazo, then believed to be the highest mountain in the world, earned him the nineteenth-century equivalent of international stardom. Carlos Montufar was so exhilarated by the experience that he got his father's blessing to accompany Humboldt and Bonpland for the rest of their journey.
Enter Simon Bolivar
July 1802, the moment of Humboldt's climb to international celebrity on Chimborazo, was also a moment of elation for nineteen-year-old Simon Bolivar, just returning to Venezuela after a three-year stay in Madrid, the capital of the Spanish Empire. Living there with his uncles, the well-heeled young man had acquired a bit of courtly polish, including his first serious attention to spelling as well as private lessons in French and dancing. Young Bolivar strutted around Madrid in a militia uniform (without doing any actual military service), spent a great deal of money, and, in less than a year, fell madly in love with a young women named Maria Teresa Rodriguez de Toro. Bolivar was then seventeen. The fact that Maria Teresa was twenty months older than her beau was a bit odd but no impediment to their marriage. Theirs was a brilliant match, the Bolivar and Rodriguez de Toro families both being rnantuano families (part of the Venezuelan elite) and longtime allies in Caracas politics. Still, they had to wait a year and a half while the families negotiated careful prenuptial agreements because of the amount of property involved. Immediately after the wedding in Madrid, Simon and Maria Teresa sailed for Venezuela.
All was right in their world. They were young, rich, and privileged, belonging to the thin upper crust of colonial society—and they really were in love, something of a rarity for people so rich, among whom a
marriage alliance was customarily family strategy. Immediately upon arrival at the port of La Guaira, they sent couriers racing up the slopes to Caracas to inform Simon's uncle and Maria Teresa's aunt. Also in the port of La Guaira, Maria Teresa met a passenger about to embark for Spain, so she took the opportunity to write her father announcing their safe arrival. "My adored Papa," begins the letter, which is chatty and unremarkable, filled with details of the voyage, news of her cousins who came to meet them in La Guaira, lots of regards, and earnest wishes for her father's good health. 6 The letter would not be worth mentioning were it not, apparently, the last one she ever wrote.
After effusive greetings to friends and relations in Caracas, the happy couple traveled immediately to one of the family's several properties, a sugar plantation just inland from Caracas. They envisioned a life for themselves in the exuberant Venezuelan countryside that Simon had visited often as a boy. Maria Teresa, born in Madrid, was seeing it all for the first time: the huge trees full of parrots and bromeliads, the cacao orchards on the hillsides, the green carpets of sugarcane in the valleys. There is no record of how she reacted to becoming the mistress of a plantation worked by Africans in bondage. Her family's fortune was, of course, built on slave labor, as were the fortunes of Venezuela's dominant families generally. Maria Teresa Rodriguez de Toro had always known that. But now she had to see it.
No doubt she simply got used to seeing slaves and began to consider it normal. That was the most common attitude in slave-owning lands. Slavery that is purely a chamber of horrors cannot last, so slave owners mixed discipline with paternalism. In some cases, warm relationships formed between them and their slaves, especially between masters and domestic servants. Simon Bolivar, like so many children of cacao and sugar planters, had been raised by a slave nanny, his black wet nurse Hipolita. Years later, when he was a victorious general leading his army in Caracas, Bolivar spotted Hipolita in the crowd and dismounted to embrace her. He also grew up with slave playmates, the perfect arrangement for a little boy who had to win whenever he competed. Paternalism (and occasionally self-interest) led to the practice of freeing favored slaves or allowing them to buy their freedom, a process called manumission. Humboldt remarked on the frequency of manumission in America.
Over the years, the descendants of manumitted slaves came to constitute a significant portion of the Venezuelan population. These free blacks were normally mixed-descent pardos. Like many of America s mixed-descent populations, the pardos were upwardly mobile. They
io Americanos
had no interest in laboring on plantations and refused to do it for any price that the planters were willing to pay. Many were artisans who earned as much as poor whites. But the caste system, designed to keep people in their place, stipulated that pardos, no matter how prosperous, could not do certain things associated with high social rank—such as ride a horse, wear silk, carry a sword, or study at a seminary—reserving those honors for bona fide (white) americanos. These limitations chafed upwardly mobile pardos, and here some resourceful servant of the Spanish monarchy identified a revenue source. In the mid-1790s, royal officials announced the sale of a new item: exemptions that would make pardos legally white, granting them permission to do whatever americanos could do.
The city council of Caracas, called the cabildo, where great families exercised quasi-hereditary control, howled with fury. What was the king thinking? The cabildo mobilized the mantuano class to protest this infamy. Simon's uncle and guardian, Carlos Palacios, in whose house the boy lived at the time of the protest, was a ringleader of the protest. The city fathers explained their case with painful clarity in a letter to the king. The pardos were descended from slaves. Some still had slaves in their families. Slaves, of course, were beaten and terrorized as a necessary part of keeping them enslaved. (This they knew well, obviously, being slave owners themselves.) Their point was that slaves had been degraded, stripped of "honor." So how could prosperous pardos be treated as the equals of people such as themselves— people defined by their honorable family histories, by their blood, clean from the stain of non-European mixture? The Marques de Toro, Maria Teresa's uncle, also signed this letter of protest to the king. The last thing the titled nobility needed was a challenge to the caste system.
The pardos had recently become insolent, explained the city fathers, crowding into the towns (or out onto the frontiers) instead of laboring on plantations alongside the slaves. The Caracas cabildo mentioned labor needs insistently in the protest. In town, the pardos became blacksmiths, carpenters, silversmiths, tailors, masons, shoemakers, and butchers. Thanks to their easy access to basic subsistence, pardo artisans could charge prices that the city fathers considered outrageous. But worst of all was the participation of thousands of pardos in the new colonial militias. The Caracas cabildo thought that putting pardos in uniform made them uppity. Pardos with a red militia badge in their hats were much too ready to speak up for themselves when appearing before a magistrate.
There was no trace of irony in the cabildo's lament. In the colonial Venezuela where Simon Bolivar grew up surrounded by enslaved servants, the principle of inequality, or rather hierarchy, ruled. Fairness was not an issue. Rulers spoke of inherited honor and privilege without embarrassment. People without honor simply did not deserve the same treatment as honorable people. Only troublemakers tried to work their way up in life. A person stripped of honor should shut up and hang his head in court, believed the cabildo. Moreover, honor, the index of inequality, ran in families. A manumitted slave who did well as a tradesman should know his place, and so should all his children. Finally, puffing themselves up to full "sons of the conquistadors" size, the city fathers warned His Majesty that swarms of "legally white" par-dos entering the church, commerce, and public office would drive all honorable people away in understandable disgust. The grim day would arrive, they warned, when Spain would be served only by blacks. Who then would defend the realm and control the slaves?
This last point they considered the critical one. Controlling the slaves had become a major concern in the 1790s because of the ongoing Haitian Revolution. When a massive revolt of plantation slaves had demolished planter control in the French colony formerly called Saint-Domingue, recalled the cabildo, the agitation of free pardos had detonated the explosive charge. Free pardos had hoped that the principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, proclaimed by the revolutionary National Assembly in Paris, might allow them to become equal citizens of the French Republic. The master class of Saint-Domingue had tried to stifle such aspirations in the National Assembly. Robespierre's radicals insisted on declaring the principle of racial equality, but it did not apply to slaves. Unlike the free pardos, the slaves of Saint-Domingue could not stake their hopes on the French National Assembly. Stimulated by talk of the rights of man and denied any hope of enjoying those rights, the slaves rebelled. Their chief leader, Toussaint Loverture, rose to prominence during a decade of bloody fighting and eventually distributed a constitution that abolished slavery and outlawed color discrimination. The Haitian Revolution was the most significant slave rebellion in world history and became, for slave owners, a frightening cautionary tale, told and retold everywhere Africans were held in bondage. For the Caracas cabildo, the conflagration in nearby Saint-Domingue, renamed Haiti, spelled imminent peril.
Simon Bolivar was eleven years old when a slave from Curacao appeared in Venezuela proclaiming "the law of the French," a dear
20 Americanos
reference to Haiti. The colonial authorities quickly snuffed out the ill-armed band of would-be liberators who responded to the call. To teach a moral lesson, the authorities severed the head of a free pardo who participated and dangled it in an iron cage on a twenty-foot pole, where passersby could stare at it for months. Another scare came a year later, in 1797, when three European Spaniards, deported from Madrid to the dungeons of La Guaira for their seditious activities, escaped with the help of a few French-influenced local radicals. The radicals' program included abolition of slavery, abolition of the Indian tribute, and free trade. The insignia of this new dawn was to be a multicolored ribbon symbolizing a rainbow coalition of white, black, pardo, and Indian. One of the participants betrayed the conspiracy, however, and it disbanded. Simon's uncle, Carlos Palacios, called it a conspiracy of la canalla del mulatismo, roughly "pardo scum." Naturally, the "scum" appealed to "the detestable principle of equality," he wrote to relatives in Madrid. This was just what they had warned the king about. 7
These anxieties were still in the air in 1802, when Simon Bolivar tried his hand at managing a sugar plantation and Maria Teresa tried hers at being a plantation mistress. If the young couple feared their slaves, however, they need not have. Maria Teresa's vulnerability to the unfamiliar environment, not a pardo uprising, was their undoing. Maria Teresa got a tropical fever that rapidly worsened. Simon frantically transported her to Caracas, where she died in January 1803. Their idyll had lasted for a very few months. Dejected, Bolivar decided to return to Europe immediately.
Humboldt Inspects Peru and New Spain
Humboldt and Bonpland were headed toward New Spain in January 1803, when Maria Teresa died. To amuse himself on the northward voyage along the Pacific coast of South America, Humboldt did his usual sampling of seawater and currents. In so doing he became the first to measure a major global phenomenon, now called the Humboldt Current, a sort of Gulf Stream in reverse that conveys frigid polar waters toward the equator.
During 1802, Humboldt and Bonpland had investigated Inca history in Peru and become fascinated by the great Andean heartland of indigenous America, with its farming villages where Quechua, the language of the Incas, remained the normal language of conversation. In Peru, Humboldt's imagination was fired by works of Inca engineering,
especially the system of paved roads, as many as ten thousand miles of them, still partially in use. The Prussian pronounced them as good as those constructed by the ancient Romans. Examining the bird manure fertilizer called guano, which the indigenous farmers had used since ancient times to maintain the fertility of their garden terraces, Humboldt found it superb and recommended its use in Europe. (When European farmers eventually tried guano years later, they bought twenty million tons of it.)
Resting in Lima, Humboldt wrote one of the rare letters to his brother that actually found its way across the Atlantic. He mentioned highlights of the last few months: the ascents of Pichincha and Chimborazo and his examination of a manuscript in a pre-Incaic language. At this point Humboldt had studied several indigenous languages and argued that they had wrongly been called "primitive." Humboldt was developing an intellectual case in favor of America's indigenous people. During the Peruvian leg of his journey, Humboldt became firmly convinced that "a darker shade of skin color is not a badge of inferiority." 8 It was the Spanish conquest, he affirmed, that had caused the misery in which Indians now lived. Humboldt described Indian porters who earned a pittance carrying travelers on their backs over Andean ridges in New Granada for three or four hours a day. Outraged by the symbolism, he and Bonpland had refused to ride on the backs of these men. But the porters, as it turned out, did not appreciate the moral support, being more concerned about their loss of earnings. Humboldt and Bonpland paid for their gallant gesture in more ways than one, as torrential rains sent water cascading down the rutted, rocky trails, soaking their boots, which eventually tore apart, leaving their feet bare and bloody.
Humboldt heads a long line of European travelers who detested nineteenth-century Lima. Lima mentally faced its seaport and the world beyond, turning its back on the Andes and the Indian majority who spoke Quechua, believed Humboldt. It was a stronghold of Spanish royal and ecclesiastical bureaucracy, not an Andean city at all. He was right. Lima had been one of the first viceregal capitals in America. In the 1600s, the rich silver mines at Potosi made the name Peru synonymous in Europe with fabulous wealth. But Potosf's "mountain of silver" stands (at the highest inhabited altitudes on earth) in L T pper Peru (modern Bolivia), and when, in the 1700s, the Spanish crown created two new viceroyalties, Upper Peru (and with it, alas, PotosO was removed from Lima's jurisdiction. Lima never really recovered from the loss of Potosf. In Humboldt's day, Lima still looked impressive
22 Americanos
from just outside the city, where one could see its dense clusters of churches and convents, testimony to bygone splendors. The greatest jewel in the Spanish imperial crown now was unquestionably no longer Peru but New Spain, where Humboldt, Bonpland, and Carlos Montufar landed in March 1803.
Humboldt's first, diplomatic thought upon landing at Acapulco, New Spain's principal Pacific port, was to write a letter to the viceroy announcing his arrival. By this time, he could do so without help in elegant, formal Spanish. He put himself at His Excellency's disposal, offering expressions of profound respect, praising His Excellency's reputation as a protector of utilitarian arts and sciences, and providing His Excellency a full itinerary of the places he had visited in America.
Overall, New Spain struck Humboldt as a far more developed colony than anything south of it. New Spain was the most populous, prosperous, and profitable of all Spain's American possessions, producing about half of all colonial revenues for the crown. Here Humboldt devoted himself to something he had promised the king of Spain: evaluating colonial mining techniques. Humboldt's many-faceted expertise included formal training in mineralogy. Humboldt being who he was, he saw room for improvement in New Spain, but less in the mines than in the overdependence on mining itself. For centuries, the Spanish crown had privileged the great silver mines of Peru and New Spain, organizing its entire American empire to serve mining interests. Given the fabulous wealth of these mines at their height, one can see why. At the time of Humboldt's visit to Guanajuato, north of Mexico City, a single mine there, the Valenciana mine, was responsible for fully one-fifth of all world silver production. The 20 percent tax on minted silver had been the Spanish crown's chief economic interest in America for centuries.
But Humboldt thought that the fertile lands of New Spain could produce even more wealth than its mines and employ more people, too. Employing people seemed urgent, because economically marginalized indigenous farmers composed half the population of New Spain. From a different perspective, "marginalized" Indians were enjoying reliable subsistence agriculture. Many of them, in fact, saw it just that way. Overall, indigenous people, accustomed to providing for their own needs, showed little interest in trade or in wage labor. Humboldt argued, however, that if Spain did not want to lose its colony, "the copper-colored race" would have to be better integrated into it and share the prosperity. Otherwise, he explained, there could be more bloody indigenous uprisings such as Peru's Tupac Amaru rebellion of the
1780s. That rebellion was the largest ever to occur in colonial America. Tens of thousands died. Once they had repressed the savagery of the rebels, the Spanish applied their own, pulling Tupac Amaru apart, limb from limb, before a jeering crowd and distributing fragments of his corpse as gruesome warnings about the perils of rebellion.
Enter Father Hidalgo
In New Spain Humboldt found people who shared his critique of Spanish imperialism, though he did not meet a dissident priest named Miguel Hidalgo. Hidalgo shared many interests with Humboldt and would have delighted in hosting our travelers. Besides, Hidalgo lived not far from the silver mines of Guanajuato, the greatest ones in New Spain, which Humboldt intended to visit.
Father Hidalgo agreed with Humboldt that diversification was essential to the economy of New Spain and that "the copper-colored race" needed opportunities to prosper. And like Humboldt, he pondered many sorts of practical innovations, things that could provide gainful employment for the Indians and mestizos. He proposed to plant some olive trees and also some vineyards. Why import olive oil and wine from Spain if New Spain could produce them? The practical answer was that Spain's monopoly trading system prohibited the colonies from competing, but Hidalgo had no patience for that. He proposed to plant mulberry trees, because he wanted to cultivate silkworms, which feed on those leaves. Breaking the profitable Chinese monopoly on silk manufacture was then being attempted in various places. Why not New Spain? Local clay would produce good pottery, and Hidalgo had specific ideas about what kinds of pots to make and sell. The rich mining city of Guanajuato would provide a nearby market, an important consideration because pots are heavy to transport. A tannery made good sense, too. After all, domestic animals were slaughtered every day for food; why not tan the hides for use as leather? In addition, one could always consider textile manufacture—on a small scale, of course, and utilizing wool; who could afford cotton? Hidalgo envisioned these as enterprises that would be owned and worked in common by the people of the village. They would produce for the market, but the organization of production would be communal rather than capitalist.
Hidalgo's friend Manuel Abad y Queipo, recendy selected as bishop of Michoacan, would have loved to meet Humboldt as well. Abad y Queipo had gained some notoriety in 1799 by writing a letter of pro-
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test to the Spanish crown. Abad y Queipo explained that nine-tenths of the people of New Spain, by his estimate, were Indians, and poor mestizos and pardos whose destitution gave them no investment in the colonial order. They resented the whites who had everything while they had nothing. The Indians protested at the special tribute they had to pay, while mestizos and pardos chafed at the caste system that limited their social mobility. Among the bishop's recommendations were elimination of the tribute and caste distinctions and free distribution of all the vacant lands in New Spain. The bishop's main recommendation, though, was more royal support for the church, most especially for the parish clergy. Only the parish clergy, according to Abad y Queipo, could exert the moral suasion needed to maintain Spanish rule in the villages of New Spain. Abad y Queipo and Hidalgo sometimes discussed such topics, as well as French books and "utilitarian arts and sciences" such as silk production, in which both had a special interest. The two were old friends.
Lately, though, the bishop had been concerned to hear that Hidalgo was under investigation by the Holy Inquisition. The investigation stemmed from indiscreet remarks made at a gathering in 1800. Hidalgo had supposedly declared disbelief in Christ's virgin birth. Hidalgo's educational views, too, were branded unorthodox—influenced by the French thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Hidalgo had supposedly declared himself in favor of "French liberty." In fact, his house in the parish of San Felipe had acquired the nickname "Little France" because, according to witnesses, Hidalgo gathered all sorts of people there in a spirit of equality, without due attention to caste distinctions or social hierarchies. Hidalgo's legendary parties at Little France included dancing, theatricals, and card playing, as well as serious discussion. Hidalgo made fun of church rituals and incense, discovered the inquisitors. His assistant, another French-reading radical priest who often substituted for Hidalgo at mass, had to be alert for his superior's practical jokes. On more than one occasion, when the faithful were already kneeling, the assistant found that Hidalgo had hidden the communion wafers. In addition, Hidalgo declared fornication to be not so bad, and he put that conviction into practice. Over the years, he lived with several women who bore him children. Josefa Quintanilla, one of these women, commonly appeared with leading roles in the theatricals that Hidalgo liked to stage at his house from time to time.
Abad y Queipo did not approve of all this, obviously. He had watched Hidalgo's behavior destroy a promising academic career. A boy from a middling family of espanoles americanos, the son of the
administrator of a rural estate, Hidalgo had gone away to school at the age of twelve. He excelled, and for the next twelve years immersed himself in Latin literature, rhetoric, logic, ethics, theology, Italian, and French, as well as two indigenous languages, Nahuatl and Otomf. Despite certain escapades and a nickname (elzoj~ro, "the fox") that gave a hint of his future trespasses, the well-liked Hidalgo gradually rose to become the rector of his school, one of New Spain's best, San Nicolas College in the provincial city of Valladolid.
Hidalgo immediately tried to modernize the curriculum and texts of San Nicolas College, moving away from a medieval-style focus on rhetoric, logic, and theory toward a focus on applied, practical knowledge. Given the large personal investment of the college faculty in the old subject matter, reform was an uphill battle. Still, to that point, Hidalgo's academic career had been a smashing triumph, one that brought sufficient financial reward to enable the purchase of considerable property. But then Hidalgo's fast living caught up with him. He mismanaged college funds and developed a large personal debt, probably betting on cards, one of the most popular pastimes in colonial New Spain. His enemies at the college demanded his ouster, and given the untidy details of Hidalgo's personal life (which included a son and a daughter), they succeeded in forcing his resignation in 1792. Since that time, Hidalgo had spent a decade as parish priest in the town of San Felipe.
As Humboldt and Bonpland made their way from Acapulco to Mexico City, Hidalgo was preparing to leave San Felipe and move to the nearby village of Dolores, a smaller, poorer, more Indian parish. In Dolores, he would have a chance to try all his projects—the silkworms and vineyards and olive orchards, the looms and pottery and tannery. Miguel Hidalgo was then fifty years old, already completing an average life span for his day, and he looked older still. He was a bit weary of all the partying and wanted somehow to make a difference in the world. He must have believed, as he moved his household (including his companion Josefa Quintana and their two children) in creaking carts to Dolores in August 1803, that he was opening his life's final chapter. But the book had an ending he couldn't foresee.
Considering Liberty and Tyranny
In August 1803, Humboldt and Bonpland were no more than a days travel away from Hidalgo, visiting Guanajuato and its mines. Hum-
26 . Imericanos
boldt had spent 1803 busily visiting mines and collecting economic and demographic data in New Spain. New Spain was another great heartland of indigenous America rather than a frontier to be explored— except, that is, for the extensive and sparsely populated provinces of the distant north, including Texas and California. Humboldt spent his time in New Spain's offices and libraries rather than tromping through the wilderness. Mexico City, the third viceregal capital on his tour of America, was by far the most impressive. Large, prosperous, bustling, spaciously planned, with imposing public buildings, Mexico City was in fact one of the most impressive capital cities anywhere, which it had been since Aztec times.
But Humboldt and Bonpland were now eager to return to Paris. First Humboldt wanted to visit the United States, however. He hoped, above all, to meet the U.S. president, Thomas Jefferson, whom he fervently admired, and so he wrote to Jefferson (in French) immediately upon landing in Philadelphia. The travelers did not have to wait long for Jefferson's enthusiastic response. Jefferson had a special interest in the geographical data Humboldt had gathered in New Spain. As president, Jefferson's grand gamble was the Louisiana Purchase—a huge tract of the North American continent that doubled the territorial claims of the young United States overnight. Jefferson had bought the territory from Napoleon, who needed money and had his hands full in Europe and in Haiti, where rebellious former slaves led by Tous-saint Loverture and his successors had decimated several large French armies. The Louisiana Purchase bordered Texas, a northern province of New Spain, but the border was entirely theoretical and still largely uncharted and unmarked in 1804, when Jefferson received Humboldt's visit. The Lewis and Clark expedition had embarked to explore the Louisiana Purchase a few weeks earlier. They would not return for years. Hence an invitation to Jefferson's county estate at Monticello.
Humboldt traveled through a still half-built Washington, D.C., to the ridges of western Virginia, where he and Jefferson talked animatedly about the emerging map of the United States. They doubtless spoke as well of their shared conviction that the New World constituted a space where liberty would create a better society. In 1804, liberty was a very important word, one that no longer has the same ring it once did. As a big idea, liberty implied the freedom to exercise rational self-interest, free from arbitrary governmental interference or tyranny. Humboldt believed that the United States understood liberty—with the glaring exception of slavery in the southern United States, of course. The first American republic had made a portentous entrance
onto the world stage. It had enjoyed favorable European trade and weathered a series of political crises, the election of "French-loving" Jefferson being the greatest of these. Humboldt took note, and back in America, so did people such as Hidalgo. But the U.S. example did not appeal to many of Hidalgo's countrymen. After all, English-speaking Protestants had been enemies of Spanish-speaking Catholics for centuries. America's freethinkers admired England and the United States, but they tended to feel more passionate about the French Revolution.
By August 1804, Humboldt and Bonpland were in Paris, where they (or rather Humboldt, always alone in the spotlight) met wonderful acclaim. At that moment, only Napoleon was more famous in Europe than Alexander von Humboldt. Napoleon seemed not to relish the competition. After Napoleon crowned himself in Notre Dame Cathedral, Humboldt attended the coronation gala and congratulated the new emperor, only to be snubbed by him: "I understand you collect plants, monsieur. So does my wife." 9 The idealistic early phase of the French Revolution was now over.
Simon Bolivar, too, was in Paris during Napoleon's autocorona-tion, distracting himself from the grief of Maria Teresa's death, often in the company of her wealthy kinsman Fernando Toro. In the heady atmosphere of the French capital, the young Venezuelan was undergoing a political metamorphosis, becoming an exponent of liberty. At stylish gatherings, he spoke in impassioned tones about Spanish tyranny and about creating new republics in America. When Humboldt and Bolivar were introduced in a Parisian salon, where elegant ladies and gentlemen gathered to socialize, Humboldt was not very impressed, but Bonpland liked Bolivar and encouraged him to keep thinking. Bolivar was raw at being a revolutionary, but it had given his energies a new focus.
A critical element of Bolivar's metamorphosis was the presence at his side of his former schoolmaster from Caracas, Simon Rodriguez, an in-your-face nonconformist, scornful of all social conventions. Rodriguez had fled Venezuela following the 1797 "French" conspiracy there, in which he was implicated. The freethinking schoolmaster escaped under an assumed name, Samuel Robinson, which he took from the book Robinson Crusoe to signal his self-reinvention as a political castaway. Rodriguez went first to Jamaica, where he improved his conversational English, then to the United States, and then, of course. to France, the original homeland of liberty, where he lived as "Samuel Robinson of Philadelphia" and shared a house, for a while, with Servando Teresa de Mier, a radical priest who had fled New Spain for
28 Americanos
political reasons. Rodriguez eventually traveled throughout Europe, learning more languages and trying his hand at a variety of trades. Rodriguez was a passionate exponent of Rousseau's educational theories, which emphasized practical experience and discovery over simple memorization of prepared lessons.
Shortly after meeting Humboldt in Paris, young Bolivar left with Rodriguez, now acting as his tutor and legal guardian, for an educational walking tour from France to Italy, a sort of crash summer-abroad course in the philosophy of liberty. While in northern Italy, tutor and student saw Napoleon in person, a defining moment in the life of Bolivar, who afterward was often compared to Napoleon. Perhaps he had Napoleon in mind when, weeks later, the young Venezuelan vowed amid the inspiring ruins of ancient Rome that he would free America from the yoke of tyranny. Also in Rome, Bolivar crossed paths again with Humboldt. Humboldt did not record his impressions of Rodriguez/Robinson, which is a shame. Instead, Humboldt hurried off to climb another volcano, Vesuvius, where he hoped he might be present at an eruption.
Jose Bonifacio Yearns for Brazil
In March 1805, an old acquaintance of Humboldt's, a Brazilian named Jose Bonifacio de Andrada e Silva, felt like erupting in a different way. Jose Bonifacio, whom we will call by his given name as Brazilians do, had come from his native Brazil to pursue a university education in Portugal. For postgraduate study, the Portuguese government had sent the bright young colonial to acquire a technical specialization in mineralogy at the Freiberg mining school in Germany, where he met Humboldt. After many years of postgraduate training in northern Europe, Jose Bonifacio had returned to Portugal, where the government quickly put him to work creating a mineralogy program for the national university, Coimbra. In addition, to take advantage of his expensive training and multifaceted talents, the Portuguese government assigned Jose Bonifacio a truly amazing number of additional projects. When would he ever go home to Brazil? He had not seen his mother in twenty years.
In the meantime, he was comforted in Portugal by the company of his younger brothers Antonio Carlos and Martim Francisco, who had confirmed the Andrada family's academic inclinations by making the transatlantic journey to get Coimbra degrees as well. Both had stayed
in Portugal afterward, seeking their fortunes. The Voltaire-reading, love-sonnet-writing Jose Bonifacio obviously adored Europe and its intellectual opportunities, not to mention the women he met there as a graduate student. Ultimately, he had settled down with an Irish girl (who, his mother could console herself, was at least Catholic). Like Humboldt, Jose Bonifacio had experienced the excitement of Paris in the summer of 1790. Being older and more conservative, however, he soon soured on the revolutionary vision. By 1805, Jose Bonifacio could nod in agreement when his government patron, former foreign minister Rodrigo de Souza Coutinho, railed against "abominable French principles." He agreed with Coutinho, too, about the promise of Portugal's enormous claims in America. As Napoleon careened around Europe, Coutinho went so far as to propose that the Portuguese monarchy relocate its royal court to Rio de Janeiro. That would be an extraordinary measure indeed—the first time a European monarch had erected a throne outside Europe.
Living next door to the French Revolution had not been easy for Spain and Portugal. Since 1793, Spain had generally succumbed to French pressure and accepted a French alliance, at the cost of almost constant British hostility. The powerful British navy made British hostility disruptive indeed to Spain's communication with its American colonies, as we have seen. Portugal had made the opposite choice, defying France and opting instead for England, its age-old ally. But Napoleon became ever more menacing. He reiterated demands that Portugal close its ports to British ships, arrest British subjects, and confiscate their goods.
Extraordinary times called for extraordinary leadership. On that point Jose Bonifacio, although a loyal Portuguese americano, had to throw up his hands. The Portuguese royal family was not strong on leadership. The queen, Maria I, was incurably insane. For the last fourteen years, her sonJoao had governed in her name as prince regent. Joao was a kind soul but no leader. In the geopolitical free-for-all of Napoleonic Europe, Joao was a cringing spectator. In late 1805, he began to sink into a depression and despondency that his wife, Carlota Joaquina, vociferously compared to the onset of his mother's madness. Carlota Joaquina's intervention was actively hostile to Joao, though one can forgive her: Carlota Joaquina's parents, the king and queen of Spain, had married her to Joao at the age often, and a royal marriage being, after all, a matter of state rather than sentiment, neither her preference nor his was consulted in the least. Now an active and strong woman who had given birth to seven princes and princesses for the
30 . Imericanos
Portuguese royal house of Braganza—another matter of state—Carlota Joaquina cordially despised her husband and wanted to undermine his regency. Next in line for the throne after Joao was her son Prince Pedro, only seven years old and not, at this point, the object of high hopes, at least on the part of Jose Bonifacio. What, indeed, could one expect of a child reared amid such bitter discord in a gloomy palace presided over by a mad grandmother?
Jose Bonifacio wrote to his patron Coutinho saying that he was sick and tired and would soon be ready to plead, "facedown at the king's feet," for permission to leave royal service and return to Brazil. 10 Now in his forties, he yearned to become a gentleman farmer, applying his scientific training to improving agricultural techniques, selective breeding, and plant propagation, just as Humboldt's friend Thomas Jefferson liked to do in the backcountry of Virginia. Indeed, Jose Bonifacio was already raising grain, vegetables, and flowers on a piece of land he rented near Coimbra, a fact that he cited to Coutinho as evidence of his serious desire to farm in Brazil.
Despite his long absence in Europe, Jose Bonifacio knew Brazil well. If he were to describe it for our benefit, he would probably start by pointing out that Brazil contained many separate, hardly connected settlement areas, called captaincies. Brazilian plantations, worked by African slaves, had pioneered large-scale export sugar production in America. Three major port cities framed the sugar-growing main area of Portuguese colonization: Recife, Salvador, and Rio de Janeiro. Each of these Atlantic ports stood where a large bay (or, the case of Recife, a series of reefs) and navigable rivers facilitated water transportation of the exported crates of sugar. In Jose Bonifacio's day, Brazil's sugar trade had declined somewhat from its glory days in the 1600s, but more than half of Brazil's entire population of two million lived in these three major coastal settlement areas. Many others lived in a string of secondary ports that stretched from the mouth of the Amazon almost to the Rio de la Plata.
By Jose Bonifacio's day, Portuguese claims (not settler population, which remained mostly coastal) had expanded inland to cover about half the South American continent, mostly because that continent is so much easier to penetrate from the Atlantic side. Jose Bonifacio would not be shy about describing Portugal's westward-advancing claims, because they were especially the work of people from his own captaincy, Sao Paulo. Today, Sao Paulo is the most dynamic of South America's megacities, and to fly over the thirty-mile climb from the Atlantic shore to the original Jesuit mission settlement area of Sao
Paulo is to see one continuous urban sprawl up the hilly slope. In Jose Bonifacio's day, the same short climb from the coast put the small town of Sao Paulo in a world apart. Sao Paulo marked the coastal terminus of several well-established Indian transportation routes that followed rivers into the heart of the continent. During the 1600s, men of Sao Paulo trekked into the interior along these routes to explore, to capture Indian slaves, and to claim new territories for the Portuguese crown.
Along the way, the trekkers of Sao Paulo found gold and diamonds. As a mineralogist, Jose Bonifacio took a great interest in the potential of Brazilian mines. Even though the Brazilian gold rush of the 1700s was over, it had transformed Brazil by drawing more settlers inland. In Jose Bonifacio's day, the primary mining captaincy, Minas Gerais, remained the only well-settled district of the Brazilian interior. Alining had created only a few islands of dense population in what remained a very sparsely populated Brazilian frontier, a vast open range where bands of indigenous people and widely separated cattle ranches coexisted uneasily.
Jose Bonifacio had reason for his booster-style optimism about Brazil. Overall, Portuguese America had fared better economically than had Spanish America of late. The 1791 Haitian Revolution, ending sugar production in what had been the Caribbean's greatest (or most gruesome) plantation colony, had created a large opening for the Brazilian product on the international market. Slaves on Brazilian sugar plantations felt the lash as their owners ramped up production. Meanwhile, some former sugar planters found an even better market for cotton, responding to the demand created by the textile factories of England's Industrial Revolution. By 1800, cotton was the second most important product of Brazilian plantations. Portuguese trade had become dependent on Brazilian agricultural products, which it reexported to the rest of Europe, supplying Brazil with English manufactures on the return voyage. Despite its relative prosperity, Brazil, like Spanish America, was limited by a monopoly trading system designed to benefit the mother country. Consequently, British smuggling was on the increase in Brazil, too.
Jose Bonifacio's description of Brazil in 1805 probably would not have included the various conspiracies that French liberty had inspired there. He was not a proponent of revolution. Moreover, the various conspiracies that occurred in late colonial Brazil were small, isolated, and quickly repressed. We note them only because they indicate the presence, and also the limits, of ideological ferment. The first conspiracy
32 Americanos
occurred in Minas Gerais in 1789. In addition to a pile of confiscated French books, the evidence against the conspirators included portions of the U.S. Constitution. The man most interested in that document was a pardo military officer who pulled teeth to supplement his income. Tiradentes, "Tooth-puller," as he was known, became the scapegoat, the only conspirator executed, because the others, who were white, used their wealth and influence to escape that fate. Tiradentes's consolation prize has been to become posthumously a Brazilian national hero. Each of Brazil's chief port cities—Rio, Salvador, and Recife— then discovered a "French" conspiracy of its own. Pardo artisans, exactly the sort who were harkening to revolutionary ideas in Venezuela during these years, figured prominently in both Rio and Salvador. A pardo tailor in Salvador was spreading the word that "all should become French and live in equality." 11 Portuguese authorities in Recife detected a group of plantation owners who they thought were meeting to discuss founding a republic under the protection of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Finally, if asked to describe Brazil in 1805, Jose Bonifacio no doubt would have taken the opportunity to denounce slavery and the slave trade, institutions that truly pervaded the Portuguese captaincies in America, from Para and Maranhao in the Amazon basin to Rio Grande do Sul in the far south. Jose Bonifacio might not have believed in democracy, but he did know that slavery was bad, and he did not hesitate to say so at a time when few dared to, especially in Brazil.
Humboldt's Famous Travelogue Appears
In September 1805, Humboldt finally returned home to Berlin. The Berlin Academy of Science made him a member, and the king of Prussia provided him a pension. In Paris, the French edition of his gargantuan travelogue began to appear: Voyage aux regions equinoxiales du Noveau Continent, fait en ij99, 1800, 1801, 1802, 1803, et 1804, par Alexandre de Humboldt et Aime Bonpland. Humboldt had collected enough data for a lifetime of publishing projects. He had a lot to say, and the reading public was eager for it. Beginning with the first landing in Cumana in 1799, Humboldt gradually filled volume after volume, thirty-five in all, with details of his adventurous exploits and scientific observations.
In addition to his multivolume travel account, Humboldt also wrote systematic statistical studies of the Mexican and Cuban economies. He
concluded the first of these, translated into English as Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, just as the Spanish monarchy was about to enter the shattering crisis that would send everything spinning out of control and precipitate movements for independence in America. Humboldt dedicated the volume to Carlos IV, who had given him permission to explore Spain's American dominions. Humboldt had not found Carlos IV's American colonies seething with rebellion, but, characteristically, he did have a number of recommendations for reforms that, his Essay hinted, might help the king retain and improve his colonies. "How can we displease a good king when we speak to him of the national interest?" he concluded hopefully, and signed it, "Your Catholic Majesty's Very Humble and Very Obedient Servant, the Baron von Humboldt." 12
Before Carlos IV ever saw the book, his kingdom had begun to crumble. But the blow that knocked it apart did not originate anywhere in America. Instead, it came from neighboring France, which had been giving Spain and the rest of Europe cause for alarm for more than a decade.
}4 . inuricanos
Two
PILLARS OF THE CROWN
1806-1810
Napoleon's invasion of Spain and Portugal, chronicled in this chapter, provoked rage and rejection in America. Crucially, but very confusingly, America's struggles for independence began with a virtually unanimous outpouring of loyalty toward the hereditary monarchies of both Spain and Portugal. This fervent loyalty appeared with crystal clarity when two expeditions of English-speaking adventurers tried to pry pieces of America away from Spain in 1806.
Miranda Invades America
The English language echoed eerily through the deserted streets of the small Venezuelan city of Coro in August 1806 as a few hundred armed men, most of them from the United States, marched into it. Almost all had come strictly for the pay, but it seems a bit unfair to call them mercenaries, because they had been recruited under false pretexts, supposedly to guard a mail shipment. Their leader—definitely not there for the pay—was a revolutionary americano named Francisco Miranda, who had lived most of his life in Europe and was returning to Venezuela after a thirty-year absence. Unfortunately for Miranda, the people of Coro heard he was coming and evacuated the city before his men entered it. The only shooting occurred when, at one point, groups of jittery invaders mistakenly fired on each other. Then, at a signal,
Miranda's men brandished linen handkerchiefs as a sort of invasion souvenir and promotional item. The handkerchiefs featured several inspirational portraits, including one of Miranda himself, as well as images of George Washington and two British officers, Admiral Home Popham and General William Beresford. As if this were not inspiration enough, the handkerchiefs offered optimistic slogans, such as "Let Arts, Industry, and Commerce Flourish." 1
Miranda had also made other preparations to attract the multitudes to his cause. His expedition had sailed with a printing press on deck, turning out proclamations and tracts on French subjects such as liberty and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, sheet by sheet, two thousand copies each. Miranda's whole life of fifty-six years could be construed as grooming for the role he was playing at Coro: his military training, his reading of French political philosophy, and above all, his many years as a self-styled revolutionary. Miranda had toured the American Revolution of George Washington (whom he met) and Tom Paine (who became his friend and advocate). From there, he traveled to Europe and toured England, Holland, Germany, Austria, Italy, Greece, Russia, Scandinavia, Switzerland, and France. Everywhere in his four-year European odyssey, Miranda talked about his revolutionary project.
Miranda culminated his international journey in Paris in May 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution, which he joined, becoming a general and eventually getting his name inscribed on the Arc de Triomphe. Despite his name being on that grand revolutionary monument, however, Miranda was not a very triumphant general, and his military failures brought him down. In 1797, he abandoned France and the French Revolution to promote his project in London. Before leaving France, he had gathered with a few other expatriate america-nos to start a movement. As a result, Miranda arrived in London sporting pseudo-diplomatic credentials as the principal agent of the Spanish American colonies. He was soon busy lobbying and publishing for his cause. Among other projects, he translated and disseminated Juan Pablo Viscardo's Open Letter to the American Spaniards, an argument for the independence of America. Miranda even sketched a vague plan for an entity to be called Colombia (in honor of Columbus) but to include rulers called "Incas" and a federal capital to be located on the isthmus of Panama (in honor of the meeting place of ancient Greek city-states on the isthmus of Corinth).
In the meantime, Miranda settled into London life, bought a three-story town house near the British Museum, married a young woman
}6 Amerianm
from Yorkshire, and socialized with leading intellectuals such as the antislavery crusader William Wilberforce, the utilitarian ("greatest good for the greatest number") philosopher Jeremy Bentham, and the pioneer educator ("each one teach one") Joseph Lancaster. Miranda had always identified more with the English than with the French. Now he made his London house the center of an international conspiracy to promote the independence of America. A vital element in that conspiracy was his Society of Rational Gentlemen, a Masonic lodge he founded in London for americanos only. Masonic-style lodges were spreading throughout the Atlantic world in the early 1800s, becoming a key mode of elite political organization.
A fellow Mason, Admiral Popham, whose approximate likeness graced Miranda's invasion souvenir handkerchiefs in Venezuela, was Miranda's most enthusiastic British supporter and collaborator. Popham viewed Spanish America as a field for the expansion of liberty (and British commerce). Spain was benighted and backward, in his view—a common one at the time in Britain and the United States. Without Spanish rule, alleged Popham, America would be better off, free to trade, develop, and enjoy the benefits of (British) civilization. In practical terms, the immediate result would be opening America to (British) trade and closing it to Napoleon, whose shadow was gradually extending over Spain. The Foreign Office promised aid, but Popham and Miranda waited in vain for it.
In late 1805, Miranda traveled to seek support in the United States. Unlike Britain, the United States was not at war with Spain, and President Thomas Jefferson committed no resources to Miranda's project. But he did not stop it, either. Fortunately for Miranda, British aid finally materialized. With that aid, and also by hocking his valuable library, Miranda managed to equip a small ship in New York and attract U.S. volunteers for his mysterious but well-paid expedition. One of them was the grandson of former U.S. president John Adams. The expeditionaries spent a month preparing in revolutionary Haiti. There the improvised invaders of this so-called Army of Colombia underwent some rudimentary military training and swore an oath "to be true and faithful to the free people of South America, independent of Spain." 2 Miranda hoisted the new flag that he had designed for the expedition: the yellow, blue, and red tricolor that still forms the basis of the Colombian, Venezuelan, and Ecuadorian national flags. Miranda had also written and printed two thousand copies of an elegantly worded "Proclamation to the Inhabitants of South America." It included provisions for military conscription for all adult males into
the hypothetical Army of Colombia and provisions stipulating that Viscardo's Open Letter to American Spaniards should be read aloud daily in public buildings.
But Miranda's careful plans to drum up a mass following for his invasion of Venezuela elicited little or no response among Venezuelans in August 1806. Despite Miranda's confident predictions, the loyal Spanish subjects of Venezuela clearly had no intention of being liberated in the manner he proposed. Instead, as days passed in the occupied ghost town of Coro, Miranda became aware that local militias were massing to crush his small force, some (though Miranda did not know this) led by the uncle of Simon Bolivar, who was soon to return from Paris. On 13 August 1806, just eleven days after landing at Coro, Miranda's force withdrew. Then, quickly, it dispersed.
The outcome of Miranda's 1806 expedition shows that "French ideas" alone could not create movements for independence in America. The people of Coro looked on Miranda as a foreign invader, with some reason. In the United States, an angry public controversy followed the failure of Miranda's project because it had violated U.S. neutrality and because the capture of his auxiliary vessels had left fifty-seven U.S. adventurers prisoner. But a strong current of anti-Spanish feeling led to the acquittal of all those charged. Meanwhile, a British warship took Miranda home to England, where church bells greeted him as a hero. Along with his English wife, Sarah, and their two children, several friends were waiting to greet Miranda when he arrived at his London townhouse. One was his friend Admiral Popham, who had quite a story of his own to tell.
British Invasions in the Rio de la Plata Also Fail
On 12 August 1806, the day before Miranda's invasion of Coro ended with a whimper, far away another invasion ended with a bang. Clouds of smoke spouted from muskets amid explosions and the confusion of house-to-house fighting in the streets of Buenos Aires. British soldiers had occupied Buenos Aires for three weeks in Admiral Popham s own renegade military operation. Popham had taken his fleet to Buenos Aires without orders to do so, after leading a successful British takeover of Cape Town, South Africa (which he had been ordered to do). As long as his force was in the South Atlantic, the admiral reasoned, it would be a shame not to "liberate" Spain's trade-hungry Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata.
}8 Americano*
The Spanish viceroy, Sobremonte, fled ignominiously at the first sign of Popham's ships, allowing a startled Buenos Aires to fall virtually without resistance. The general commanding the invasion force was Beresford, the second face on Miranda's invasion souvenir handkerchiefs. To understand what Popham and Beresford were doing, one must consider that British commerce was driving the early 1800s version of economic globalization. Although the word did not exist, proponents of globalization, then as now, rationalized their own gain as a universal good. In fact, large-scale smuggling of British goods in America did reveal high demand for those goods, and British commercial interests urgently desired to break into the Spanish system of colonial trade. Therefore, General Beresford announced liberation from the Spanish trade monopoly immediately after occupying Buenos Aires. Inhabitants of the city could now enjoy the benefits of liberty and civilization, he explained, as well as international products at moderate prices. A number of Buenos Aires slaves misinterpreted his explanation of liberty, escaped their masters, and had to be returned by Beresford, who did not intend to create economic disruptions. Spanish monopoly merchants shut their doors in protest, but Beresford ordered them open for business. A few inhabitants of Buenos Aires, however, were actually eager for this sort of liberation.
Mariquita Sanchez, a young woman of the city, longed for the fresh breeze of the quickening Atlantic world. Mariquita was nineteen, newly wed in an era when marriage defined a woman's life, and her marriage had been a dramatic affair. Mariquita's father was a merchant and therefore, unsurprisingly, a europeo whose success within the Spanish monopoly system depended on his transatlantic connections in Spain. Ideally, business connections were family connections, and that is what Mariquita's father had in mind when, around the time Mariquita turned fourteen, he chose his preferred future son-in-law, a merchant and a europeo like himself. Mariquita refused to marry the man, and she did, after all, have to say "I do," even in an arranged marriage. So her father deposited her in a convent for safekeeping while his friends deployed her beau, a vibrant young americano naval captain of English descent, to Spain. The lovers kept passionately faithful and legally defended their right to marry for love, eventually triumphing in a case personally decided by the viceroy. At the time, marrying for love rather than family interest constituted a sort of radical individualism, part of the raft of new ideas floating out of Europe, most especially France. At least one of these ideas, though—free trade—found its supreme exponents in Britain. Therefore, Beresford's "liberation" of Buenos Aires
seemed pregnant with enticing possibilities to certain dissident freethinkers such as Mariquita and her husband, who invited Beresford to gatherings at their house.
Freethinkers were few in 1806 Buenos Aires, though, and resistance to Beresford's invasion came quickly. In three weeks, Buenos Aires forces regrouped in Montevideo, and, with help from that city, the other Spanish stronghold in the Rio de la Plata, recaptured Buenos Aires from the invaders. Jose Artigas was present at the final battle, sent by the governor of Montevideo to bring word of the outcome. As militias of Buenos Aires and Montevideo converged on the main square of Buenos Aires, Beresford quickly surrendered and withdrew to Popham's warships offshore. The heroes of the recapture of Buenos Aires were the local americano militias, led by Santiago Liniers, a French officer in the service of the Spanish crown.
Artigas rushed home to Montevideo, where joy greeted the news that the "heretics"—that is, Protestants—had been defeated, having found only a few more supporters than had Miranda in Coro. The Spanish imperial government granted Montevideo a new honorific title, "Most Loyal and Reconquering," for its role in the recapture of Buenos Aires. Montevideo was in fact a more important naval and military base than Buenos Aires itself, and better fortified, with a fine harbor that Buenos Aires emphatically lacked. Popham's reconnaissance vessels had given forewarning of his invasion in late 1805 by showing themselves on the coast of the Rio de la Plata, and Montevideo had actively prepared to face the threat. A Montevideo-based beef jerker— which is to say a leading industrialist or the closest thing to it in the Rio de la Plata—had offered to fund a force of 280 volunteers, recruited from the countryside, against the British threat.
The officer charged with sifting through the gaucho riffraff to create such a force was the former contraband trail boss Jose Artigas. Artigas had recently married and received permission to leave the mounted police force that he had captained, by now, for about ten years. His bride was not Isabel Velasquez, who apparently had died a few years before, but rather his first cousin Rafaela, a woman eleven years younger than he. If Artigas had been looking forward to settling down, however, he forgot about that as he rode around the frontier in search of roving gauchos who habitually lived off the land for months and required little or no training to become light cavalry. Artigas was empowered to offer various contrabandists, renegades, and bandits among his acquaintances the kind of amnesty he had received himself a decade earlier. He also visited Montevideo's prison and recruited
40 Americanos
several dozen likely candidates there. The recorded testimony of Venancio Benavides, "When I need a shirt, I stop and work, and when I get the shirt, I ride," can function as a concise rendering of the carefree gaucho lifestyle. 3 His file showed that the police had captured Benavides only by shooting his horse, and then, when he was already a prisoner with hands tied, Benavides had suddenly leaped onto a guard's horse and thrown the guard off it, whereupon the police had to shoot that horse, too. Here, obviously, was the sort of recruit that Artigas sought.
Larger assets than this would be required, however, to resist what came next. General Beresford's withdrawal from Buenos Aires proved merely tactical. In October he and Popham were back, strongly reinforced, and this time they planned to take Montevideo first. They landed at the nearby town of Maldonado, sacked it, and waited. The proven vulnerability of Buenos Aires had awakened official British support for Popham's rogue expedition, and in mid-January 1807 scores of British vessels, an entire fleet, began disembarking along the beach outside Montevideo. Fortunately for the British, Viceroy Sobremonte had taken personal command of Spanish troops in Montevideo and, as usual, he did everything wrong. Ill-led, overmatched, and outnumbered, the defenders surrendered the city to the British two weeks later, leaving four hundred dead. Sobremonte himself had withdrawn discreetly before the British closed the siege.
The British occupiers announced a new dawn, including free trade, of course, as well as Montevideo's first newspaper, Southern Star, to be published in English and Spanish. Mostly, though, they prepared their assault on Buenos Aires, where Liniers was organizing local militias for the defense. London sent a new general, John Whitelocke, to command the operation, but the British attack on Buenos Aires ended in a defeat so convincing that the terms of Whitelocke's 6 July 1807 surrender included total British withdrawal from the Rio de la Plata. Deserted by their incompetent Spanish viceroy, americano militiamen had trounced a well-armed force of professional European soldiers. A new spirit of self-sufficiency infused the defenders. Riding a wave of popular support for Liniers and scorn for Sobremonte, and clearly exceeding their authority, the Buenos Aires militias and city council declared Liniers viceroy. The confidence gained by the militias of Buenos Aires would have a clear impact during the looming crisis of the Spanish monarchy.
The most important lesson of both Popham's and Miranda's plans for the liberation of America is how little popular support they received.
The new political philosophy of the Enlightenment might be, or rather was, tremendously influential for a few French- and English-reading intellectuals in the Spanish colonies. Overall, however, the language of liberty rang false for most inhabitants of America in 1806-7. Nor were British offers of economic benefits enough to make people betray king and country and embrace invading "heretics." But a pivotal moment in world history was about to begin: Spain's hereditary British enemies would soon become allies.
Prince RegentJoao Sails for Brazil
Napoleon's 8 September 1807 letter to Prince Regent Joao of Portugal, interrupting the seclusion of Joao's life at the royal residence and monastery called Mafra, was a stark ultimatum: pick a side, England or France, and pick now. Faced with an urgent decision, Joao did what he habitually did. He stalled, closing Portuguese ports to British ships but not arresting British subjects or confiscating their goods as Napoleon demanded. The crafty, procrastinating prince also offered his firstborn son, Pedro, now nine years old, as a husband for Napoleon's niece. Joao reasoned that the upstart emperor would be eager to see his family marry traditional royalty. Furthermore, Napoleon's niece was the daughter of the French general Murat, who was now poised to lead the French invasion of Portugal. So it would have been a brilliant stroke of diplomacy indeed had Murat and Joao become in-laws just at that moment.
But Napoleon was not inclined to marry his relations into the Portuguese royal family. Instead, he made plans to invade and partition Portugal. To secure Spanish cooperation, he offered southern Portugal as a prize to be ruled by the infamous Godoy, lover of the Spanish queen. Murat's troops began marching through Spain on their way to Portugal, while Spain's own army prepared to collaborate with the French invasion.
Reluctantly, Joao began to ready the Portuguese fleet. The old idea of moving his royal court to Brazil had gained new appeal. Still, he wavered. Perhaps it was shameful not to stay and fight. As a sort of dynastic insurance policy, a few princes or princesses could be sent to Brazil, out of French reach. On 11 November 1807, news reached Lisbon that French soldiers had entered Portugal and were marching toward the capital. That same day, the British fleet arrived at Lisbon with instructions to evacuate the Portuguese royal family. "We all go
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or none of us goes," said Joao's mother, the mad Maria I, who supposedly settled the matter. 4 The whole Portuguese royal court, including thousands of courtiers and servants, would move to Brazil. Tentative preparations for the voyage had been secret until then for fear of alarming the populace. As the preparations became frantically public, the people of Lisbon expressed dismay at seeing their royal family abandon them in the face of an invading army. The Lisbon waterfront was a swirling mass of wagons and carts, a jumble of chests and wardrobes and boxes containing everything from china to silver services to linens to family portraits in heavy carved frames. Crowds of commoners shouted and sobbed as they watched.
Murat's soldiers were marching into the outskirts of Lisbon when Joao and Carlota Joaquina arrived at the waterfront in separate coaches and embarked on the separate ships that would carry them to Brazil. Young Prince Pedro arrived with his mad grandmother, who shouted at the coachman not to drive like a fleeing bandit. Joao issued a final proclamation explaining that his departure from Portugal would prevent the country from suffering for his sake. Seeking conciliation to the last, he gave instructions for Murat's troops to be well fed and well housed. France and Portugal were destined to be friends, Joao declared. The entire Portuguese royal family then sailed away with every vessel in the Lisbon harbor fit to put to sea and a British naval escort hovering around.
Jose Bonifacio de Andrada was not among the thousands of Portuguese evacuated to Brazil with the royal court. He clearly could have accompanied his patron, Rodrigo de Souza Coutinho, who did make the voyage. Jose Bonifacio's brothers Antonio Carlos and Martim Francisco had already returned to Brazil and now occupied prestigious positions in the Andrada family's home province of Sao Paulo. Jose Bonifacio was no longer a young man, and he dearly wished to see Brazil again. But when the last sails of the departing fleet disappeared over the Atlantic horizon, Jose Bonifacio turned his attention to organizing a corps of academic volunteers at Coimbra University to fight the French invaders.
Meanwhile, in the middle of the Atlantic, the Portuguese royal family and courtiers began to endure the inevitable result of hurried and incomplete preparations. Potable water, passable food, and space itself were at a premium aboard ship. Landlubber courtiers in luxurious garments turned green and vomited copiously all over themselves. Meanwhile, Prince Pedro's new tutor kept him busy with his Latin lessons, reading Virgil, or at least trying to. Prince Pedro was far from studious,
but the plot of Virgil's Aeneid, in which an exiled king crosses the sea with his ailing mother and young son to found a new kingdom, understandably caught the nine-year-old's attention.
Finally, in late January 1808, Joao's fleet and its British escort sailed into the beautiful Bay of All Saints, site of Brazil's first capital: Salvador, Bahia. The people of Salvador erupted with jubilation, and the city fathers tried mightily to convince their sovereign to make his new capital right there. Joao had his heart set on Rio de Janeiro, however, and tactfully declined the Bahians' fervent plea. Before continuing to Rio, he declared Brazilian ports open to trading ships from all nations, most especially from Britain. On one hand, ending the Portuguese trade monopoly was mere necessity. Portugal, previously the destination of all Brazilian trade, lay under enemy control. On the other hand, free commercial access to Brazil constituted an urgent goal of Joao's new British allies. Not by accident did Joao begin a century of British commercial domination in Brazil within days after setting foot on Brazilian soil. That was, in effect, a condition of his being there.
On 8 March 1808, Joao and company finally disembarked in Rio de Janeiro as fireworks exploded overhead, church bells pealed throughout the city, and warships fired salvos in spectacularly beautiful Guanabara Bay. The city fathers and excited populace crowded the waterfront to greet the royal family, and Joao went straight to hear mass in a solemn procession, a silk awning held over his head, the streets packed with onlookers. The prince regent loved Rio immediately, and Rio loved him. Most Portuguese courtiers liked Rio considerably less than did the prince regent, however. Carlota Joaquina liked it least of all.
Napoleon Invades Spain, Too
Meanwhile, in spite of growing resistance from people such as Jose Bonifacio, combined French-Spanish forces still occupied Portugal in March 1808. Among the soldiers in the occupying army was a thirty-year-old Spanish officer named Jose de San Martin. San Martin was a seasoned veteran from a military family. He was an americano, born at a remote outpost called Yapeyu during his father's tour of dut\* on the Plata frontier, but his childhood residence in America lasted only a tew years. By the time he reached school age, San Martins family had returned to Spain. When he was eleven years old, San Martin and his two brothers followed their father into the Spanish army, becoming
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career officers and witnessing the tumultuous European events of 1791-1808 from the vantage point of men who wore a Spanish uniform. In March 1808, San Martin was on the staff of the general commanding Spanish troops in Portugal when news began to arrive of breathtaking events in Spain.
Northern Spain was filling up with a hundred thousand French troops, far more than required to support operations in Portugal. Consequently, Spanish queen Maria Luisa's lover, Godoy, who had instigated the French incursion for his personal benefit, had risen to new heights of unpopularity, and Maria Luisa along with him. The Spanish people blamed Carlos IV for not controlling his wife. The disgraced royal family and royal favorite stayed away from Madrid, residing in outlying palaces, in order to avoid the hostility of urban crowds. The crowds, in turn, began to view Carlos IV's son and heir, Prince Fernando, as the kingdom's only hope. Unfortunately for the kingdom, Fernando's popularity had little basis in the prince's true qualities. Instead, Fernando's popularity expanded, as a sort of equal and opposite reaction, in direct proportion to the growing hatred of Godoy. It was no longer necessary even to say the prince's name. Instead, he became simply el deseado, the Desired One.
Gradually, as Napoleon's troops occupied much of northern Spain, the French emperor's aggressive purpose became unmistakable. Upon receiving a Napoleonic ultimatum to surrender their kingdom, the Spanish royal family, then lodged at their palace at Aranjuez, near Madrid, prepared to retreat south. Rumors flew through Aranjuez and beyond saying that the royal family intended to flee across the Atlantic to New Spain. No such plans existed, but the idea was plausible enough in light of Joao's departure from Lisbon. The Spanish people thought that an idea so awful could have come only from Godoy, and first hundreds and then thousands of rioters streamed into Aranjuez looking for him. Godoy had to hide in an attic for more than a day to escape their wrath, his days of political influence ended forever. The Spanish military detachments around the palace at Aranjuez shared the sentiments of their rioting countrymen and eventually joined them. On 19 March 1808, the Aranjuez riot came to a head when the crowd forced Carlos IV to abdicate his throne in favor of Prince Fernando, who was acclaimed as king that same night. Fernando's entry into Madrid days later was celebrated by delirious multitudes that lined sidewalks and filled balconies.
The Desired One began to disappoint his yearning subjects immediately. Under the protection of French troops, his father, Carlos,
asked for the Spanish throne back, pointing out that he had not abdicated of his free will. With disastrously poor judgment, father and son accepted an invitation from Napoleon to settle the matter at a friendly meeting in southern France, at Bayonne. Once in Bayonne, however, both Fernando and Carlos became, in effect, Napoleon's prisoners, and the foxy emperor forced both to renounce their claims to the Spanish throne in favor of a new dynasty, the Bonapartes. The first Bonaparte king of Spain would be Napoleon's brother Joseph. Carlos and Maria Luisa went into Italian exile. The Spanish people did not want them back. But Spain did want Fernando, who would remain in French custody for the next six years, giving his loyal subjects further opportunity to yearn for him as a symbol, the Desired One, without really knowing him.
News of Napoleon's treachery spread through Spain and also to Spanish forces in Portugal. On 2 May 1808, a famous day on the Spanish patriotic calendar, the people of Madrid rose against the occupying French army, which quelled the uprising with mass executions. Throughout the remaining Spanish provinces not yet under French occupation, provincial leaders formed committees of resistance called juntas, refusing to recognize the legitimacy of a new Bonaparte dynasty and declaring that in the king's absence, sovereignty reverted to the provincial level. Among the first initiatives of the provincial juntas was an appeal for help to Napoleon's archenemy, Britain. As this earthquake rocked the political landscape, San Martin's unit separated from its erstwhile French allies, withdrew from Portugal, and returned to Spain.
In Spain's principal southern port, Cadiz, San Martin, a member of the commanding Spanish general's inner circle, learned as much as anyone could about these confusing events. General Solano, his commander, was his friend and confidant, no doubt in part because Solano, too, was an americano. The two socialized together despite the difference in rank. They even resembled each other, which was too bad for San Martin on a day in late May 1808 that marked him for life. General Solano had just announced his decision not to lead his troops into revolt against the French occupation. The weakened Spanish army was in no shape to fight their powerful former allies, he reasoned. British helpfulness remained to be tested, and Solano had little faith in the success of the popular uprising against the French. Unfortunately for him, the popular uprising had an equally skeptical view ot General Solano, whose reputation in the Spanish army rested on his advocacy of French-style organization and tactics. Accusing
46 . imeriamos
Solano of treacherous pro-French sympathies, a patriotic crowd seized San Martin's friend, patron, and mentor and tore him to bits. San Martin himself was mistaken for Solano at one point and barely escaped with his life. Ever after, San Martin carried a medal with Solano's image in his pocket, and from then on he equated democracy with mob rule.
Meanwhile, Spain's mobilization of national resistance against French occupation was becoming a reality. Among all the provincial juntas, Seville's grandly titled Supreme Junta of Spain and the Indies was the strongest, and for logical reasons, such as the city's size, wealth, and overseas connections, not to mention its location as far from France as possible. In combination with the nearby port of Cadiz, Seville had dominated trade with America for centuries and served as well as the primary administrative center for Spain's overseas colonies. Seville's Supreme Junta got a major boost also when its armed forces scored two victories against the French. The first of these, which occurred in late June 1808, was an extremely minor skirmish. Still, it was the first Spanish victory of the war, and so the patriots celebrated. For our purposes, its only significance is the name of the junior officer commanding Spanish forces that day: Jose de San Martin. San Martin also distinguished himself the next month at the larger battle of Bailen, which caused Joseph Bonaparte to flee temporarily from Madrid, at great cost to his dignity, only ten days after arriving there to claim his throne.
For seven years, Spain and Portugal (together, the Iberian Peninsula) became the battleground of what the English call the Peninsular War and remember as the campaign in which the Duke of Wellington emerged as Napoleon's battlefield nemesis. For Spain and Portugal, the Peninsular War was a national uprising against armies of occupation, a patriotic war of national independence. Civilian volunteers such as Jose Bonifacio composed the chief Portuguese and Spanish forces, the regular troops being mostly English or French. The British coun-terinvasion began around Lisbon, where General Beresford was on hand to organize the Portuguese volunteers.
Napoleon's 1807-8 invasion of the Iberian Peninsula triggered sweeping but gradual changes in America. It provoked the Portuguese monarchy to do what no other European monarchy ever had—leave Europe, making Brazil, for the time being, the seat of the Portuguese monarchy. And it provoked in the Spanish colonies a slow-motion crisis of political legitimacy. Who should rule in the absence of the king?
Americanos Begin to React
News of the European crisis arrived in New Spain with a delay of about six weeks. Sporadic, contradictory reports of the most dramatic possible character—concerning the French invasion of Spain, the uprising at Aranjuez, the fall of Godoy, the forced abdication of Carlos IV, the fleeting reign of the Desired One, the 2 May massacres in Madrid, and the formation of Spanish regional juntas—surged through the country, week after shocking week, during the months of June and July 1808. The spontaneous public reaction in New Spain included righteous satisfaction at the eclipse of Godoy, angry condemnation of France, and tender concern for Prince Fernando, whom the people of New Spain immediately accepted as king, swearing obedience to him in solemn public ceremonies as Fernando VII. Overall, americanos seemed just as loyal as europeos to the Desired One, but americano attitudes toward the Spanish juntas were much brisker. Did the juntas speak for the king? No. And unless they spoke for the king, who were the juntas, after all, but simply bossy gachu-pines giving orders?
In August 1808, when emissaries sent by Seville's Supreme Junta of Spain and the Indies appeared in Mexico City, New Spain's small, but rich and powerful, community of europeos wanted the government of New Spain to recognize the Seville junta's paramount authority. Given the Seville junta's strong links to commercial interests, this europeo pressure was predictable. Europeo merchants were the chief beneficiaries of the monopoly mercantile system. Overall, europeos controlled the ruling institutions of New Spain, but americanos did predominate on the Mexico City council, where the representatives of Seville's self-styled Supreme Junta presented themselves in August 1808, calling for aid and obedience.
What happened next was an event that requires special terminology. The emissaries of Seville were invited to an open meeting of the city council, called a cabildo abierto. Cabildos abiertos constituted the grassroots of traditional Spanish self-governance. A cabildo abierto included anyone believed deserving to be heard, which meant, basically, a wealthy few. Those in attendance would include an honor roll of civil, military, and church officials, including (in a major capital such as Mexico City) justices of the high court, called the audiencsa, and members of the official monopoly merchant's guild, called the amsulado. In Mexico City, as throughout America, these dignitaries were predominantly europeos. But the members of the normal city council also
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attended the cabildo abierto, obviously, and they were predominantly americanos.
At the 1808 cabildo abierto in Mexico City, Father Servando Teresa de Mier spoke up to say bluntly that the main interest of the europeos was preserving their trade monopoly. Temporarily back in Mexico City, the irreverent priest (former roommate of Simon Rodriguez in France) was displaying the penchant for insubordination that would soon send him back into exile. His point was a self-evident but very sore one. As with the systematic preferment of europeos for office holding, Spain's trade monopoly showed that New Spain was treated as a colony. But the americanos of New Spain preferred to think of themselves as the descendants of valiant conquerors who had defeated the Aztecs and carved out a new kingdom in America. In an argument later heard across the hemisphere, the bold americanos of Mexico City's 1808 cabildo abierto cited political traditions with an impeccable Spanish pedigree to deny that the king's American kingdoms were, by rights, colonies of Spain at all. Spain and New Spain, they insisted, were separate kingdoms ruled by the same monarch. Americanos owed no obedience to europeos, only to Fernando. According to a metaphor often heard in these months, Spain and America were separate and equal pillars of Fernando's crown. Spanish juntas spoke only for Spain, and New Spain should speak for itself.
This argument was all the more persuasive because of the confusion that reigned among the Spanish juntas themselves. Although Seville's junta had styled itself the Supreme Junta of Spain and the Indies, it was just a regional junta with outsized ambitions. The other Spanish juntas did not accept the authority of Seville. In fact, during the meetings of Mexico City's 1808 cabildo abierto someone read a letter from a different Spanish junta, warning against Seville's false claims to supremacy. Briefly, the city council began to consider the idea of forming their own junta in support of Fernando VII.
Meanwhile, Iturrigaray, the viceroy of New Spain, had suffered the climate of uncertainty more than most, being a political appointee who owed his job to the despised Godoy. Iturrigaray had so many enemies among the europeos of Mexico City that only support from the americanos could save his political skin. But Iturrigaray's pro-americano sympathies smacked of danger to powerful europeos in the royal administration, church hierarchy, merchant community, and mining aristocracy. To guarantee the security of Spain's most profitable colony, the europeo faction organized a preemptive coup and, in mid-September, arrested Iturrigaray to replace him with someone
they could control. Less than two years after the disgrace of Sobre-monte, a second Spanish viceroy had toppled. A major shake-up was beginning in America.
For the present, that shake-up was most meaningful to the wealthy. Take Leona Vicario, a recently orphaned young woman of nineteen who lived in Mexico City. Leona's father was a rich europeo merchant who had married a poor but respectable and attractive americana, a common pattern. Leona's family fortune allowed her guardian uncle to make her the mistress of a big house all her own, with many servants. Young, smart, and talented in addition to wealthy and orphaned, Leona was extremely marriageable. During the exciting political events of 1808, her engagement to a young man equally opulent and attractive dominated her attention. Indeed, Leona's fiance belonged to a branch of the family that owned Guanajuato's fabled Valenciana silver mine. And Leona's future father-in-law was close to Viceroy Iturrigaray, so close, in fact, that the overthrow of Iturrigaray dragged him down, too. Leona's fiance had to leave her and flee New Spain for fear of europeo reprisals. The widening divide between europeos and americanos defined Leona Vicario's political orientation in the years to come.
Meet Manuela
Something similar happened in the life of Manuela Saenz, a twelve-year-old girl living in the distant and far smaller city of Quito. Manuela was not rich. Her father, like Leona Vicario's, was a europeo merchant, quite prosperous but not married to her mother, an americana who had borne Manuela out of wedlock. One early afternoon in late March 1809, Manuela and her mother were called to the window by the sound of many horses' hooves echoing on the cobblestone streets of Quito. Flanked by guards, Juan P10 Montiifar, the Marques de Selva Alegre, head of one of Quito's leading americano families (who had hosted Humboldt's stay in the city and whose son Carlos climbed Chimbo-razo with Humboldt), entered the city under guard as a prisoner, arrested for plotting against the Spanish government.
In Quito, as throughout America in early 1809, people were struggling to gather, interpret, and assimilate news of European events. Hardly had they heard that Fernando had mounted the throne when they learned that Joseph Bonaparte had pushed him off it. No sooner had they heard of Seville's Supreme Junta of Spain and the Indies than
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they learned that a new Central Junta claimed supremacy over it. Who now represented legitimate royal authority? Throughout America, the argument made in New Spain sounded again and again: no Spanish junta spoke for the king; americanos owed no obedience to Spain per se. In the absence of the legitimate king, Fernando, went the argument, his subjects should do exactly the same in America as in Spain, that is, form caretaker juntas to rule in his name until he returned. The March 1809 conspiracy in Quito had exactly that very popular aim. Bowing to public pressure, the Spanish president of the city's audiencia (high court) eventually released Montufar and the others, to the glee of Quito's defiant americanos.
These political events concerned Manuela's family directly. Her europeo father was prominent in Quito and a sworn enemy of the Montufar clan. Manuela, on the other hand, lived with her mother, now totally abandoned by her father. Manuela's family regarded Montufar not as a criminal conspirator but as a hero. Manuela's adolescent sympathies soured toward europeos partly for personal reasons, but similar changes of heart were then occurring throughout the Andes, most notably in the cities of Chuquisaca and La Paz, in Upper Peru.
Chuquisaca, like Quito the location of an audiencia, overthrew the Spanish president of that body. The Chuquisaca rebels included everyone from audiencia judges and americano lawyers to angry crowds of mestizo townspeople motivated by the rumor that the audiencia president had been accepting diplomatic overtures from Carlota Joaquina, the Portuguese prince regent's wife and chief detractor, now residing in Rio de Janeiro. Carlota Joaquina was a Spanish princess, after all. In fact, she was Fernando's sister, the only member of her family not under Napoleon's thumb in 1809.
The fracas in Chuquisaca encouraged the city council of nearby La Paz to depose its own royal administrator, amid loud declarations of loyalty to Fernando VII, in July 1809. The La Paz uprising went further than Chuquisaca's, founding a junta and reaching out for support to the Quechua- and Aymara-speaking Indians of Upper Peru. The leader of the movement, Pedro Domingo Murillo, was a mestizo, although an exceedingly rich one. The declarations of the La Paz junta were the boldest claims of americano independence so far— independence from Spain, but not from the Desired One, of course. Less than a month after the creation of the La Paz junta, americano conspirators in Manuela's Quito were at it again. Fifty or so delegates met on an August 1809 evening (at the house of a freethinking patriotic
lady) and moved to depose the audiencia president and form a junta of their own in the name of Fernando VII but under the leadership of the Marques of Selva Alegre. The people of Quito lit their windows with candles for three nights in celebration. The junta quickly imprisoned hostile europeos such as Manuela's father.
Unfortunately for the juntas of La Paz and Quito, the Spanish viceroy in nearby Lima was among the most able colonial administrators ever sent to America. And by 1809 Viceroy Abascal was a seasoned ruler with wide experience, having served in the Caribbean, New Spain, and the Rio de la Plata, including seven years as audiencia president in Guadalajara, before becoming viceroy of Peru. At the helm of Spain's chief South American viceroyalty, Abascal had been notably effective, building fortifications, introducing steam power in Peru's deep-shaft silver mines, founding a botanical garden and a medical school, and more recently raising unimaginable sums of money for patriotic Spanish resistance against Napoleon. Under Abascal's stern influence, the americanos of Lima swore an oath of allegiance to the new Central Junta without a peep about Peru not being a colony of Spain.
When word reached Lima of juntas in Quito and La Paz, Abascal responded with quick and deadly force. By November 1809, the viceroy's soldiers had erased all trace of upstart juntas in the Andean highlands. In La Paz, they executed Pedro Domingo Murillo and eight other rebels. Abascal's forces put down the Quito junta as well. None of Quito's more aristocratic rebels got a death sentence, but sixty were imprisoned indefinitely. Among those leveling accusations at the amer-icano rebels of Quito was Manuela's father, newly released from prison.
Despite the drama of these events, however, other things filled Manuela's adolescent days. Her slave Jonatas, for example, a girl only two or three years older than Manuela, was an ever-present and truly important companion, and would be that throughout her life. WTien Manuela's half sister by her father's wife married a Spaniard twice her age and left for Spain, Manuela shared the family's flurry of excitement. Her relationship with her father, however, remained troubled. And that was not her only trouble. Manuela's indocile temperament created constant friction in socially conservative Quito, where women and children were to be seen and not heard. Soon her mother would intern her in a convent school, not at all the place for a free spirit such as Manuela. For the next ten years, her rebelliousness would have a personal rather than political focus.
5 2 . imeriamas
Manuela Saenz, Leona Vicario, and Mariquita Sanchez—destined to become the most famous americana patriots—had in common an unusual degree of independence from their fathers. Manuela was estranged from hers, Leona's had died, and Mariquita faced hers down in a court battle. In a society ruled by patriarchy, these young women had lost, escaped, or resisted patriarchal authority. No wonder that eventually they would not hesitate to defy the rule of the "father king," as he was frequently called.
Resistance to Napoleon Collapses in Spain
Back in Spain, Jose de San Martin was working to help organize the resistance against French occupation in the province of Catalonia during November 1809. Spanish patriot volunteers did not compose regular uniformed army units, but rather, as in the case of the Portuguese patriots fighting with Wellington, were members of irregular forces who seldom confronted the French army directly in the fixed battle formations of the day, drums beating and flags waving. Instead, Spanish patriot volunteers fought the "little war" {guerrilla, in Spanish) of secrecy, surprise, and hit-and-run tactics against superior arms. They did not invent these tactics, of course, but they gave them the name we still use today. San Martin's part in this war was training, organization, and liaison and did not involve combat because he fell gravely ill. Apparently this was the first major onset of the lung disease, tuberculosis, against which he struggled for decades.
Convalescing in Seville during the eventful early months of 1809, San Martin witnessed firsthand the evolution of Spanish attempts to form a unified government of resistance. During most of that year, Seville hosted the Central Junta, an umbrella organization consisting of two delegates from each of Spain's regional juntas. Seville's so-called Supreme Junta resisted the authority of the Central Junta at first. Eventually, however, the Central Junta did gain recognition throughout unoccupied Spain.
But the Central Junta could not hold back the French invasion gradually pouring south across the Spanish countryside. A crushingly superior French army of more than two hundred thousand led by Napoleon himself had restored frere Joseph Bonaparte to the Spanish throne in Madrid by the end of 1809, when Spanish patriot resistance collapsed altogether and the Central Junta had to flee from Seville to the nearby port of Cadiz. Eventually, Spain's government of national
resistance had lost control of all Spanish territory outside Cadiz, a near-island, where it could be defended by the guns of British warships and maintain communications with America. No sooner had the Central Junta arrived in Cadiz, than it dissolved, transferring its sagging authority to a newly formed Council of Regents that claimed, uncon-vincingly, to speak directly for Fernando. The existing regional juntas, including the one in Cadiz itself, were slow to accept the authority of the regency. The Cadiz junta was so concerned about the demoralizing effect that all this bad news might have in America that it prohibited the departure of ships. But bad news does not sail, it flies.
Americanos Organize at Queretaro
The apparent collapse of Spanish resistance to Napoleon emboldened americano militia officers to make a new try at a junta for New Spain. Americano sympathies for the now deposed, pro-americano Viceroy Iturrigaray had first arisen during militia exercises that Iturrigaray ordered in 1807. New Spain's twenty battalions of infantry militia and twenty-four of cavalry militia had converged on a high plain near the city of Jalapa, a strategic strong point for the defense of New Spain against invasion by sea, and engaged in several months of training and male bonding. Recent invasion attempts at Coro, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires gave them much to talk about. When Iturrigaray went to direct their maneuvers personally, each unit vied to surpass the next in skill and enthusiasm. Whatever his failings, Iturrigaray possessed a winning manner in the rough male society of a military camp, and a number of americano officers became personally devoted to him during the weeks of maneuvers.
The most important of these officers, for our story, was Ignacio Allende, a forty-year-old americano of considerable wealth from the town of San Miguel, not far from Hidalgo's village of Dolores. When Mexico City europeos overthrew Viceroy Iturrigaray in 1808, Allende was spurred to action against the europeos and joined a major plot, the so-called Valladolid Conspiracy, to create a junta in New Spain. Unfortunately for Allende, word of the plotting reached the ears of the Spanish government. The government responded with leniency, its customary attitude toward disgruntled americanos, in contrast to the harsh treatment of mestizos such as Pedro Domingo Murillo and others executed in La Paz. As soon as he was released, though, Allende went back to organizing.
54 Am triui nos
In March 1810, Allende and other militia officers began to visit Miguel Hidalgo at his house in the village of Dolores. Supposedly the military men were showing an interest in the worldly priest's famous parties, but really they had come to invite Hidalgo into the conspiracy. Hidalgo was now fifty-seven years old and enjoying the fruits of his diverse agricultural and other projects. He was comfortable and respected, and he had a scandalously gratifying personal life. But Hidalgo was also an idealist and a dreamer, and he had always been reckless. Furthermore, he had believed for years in the same liberty that inspired Humboldt, Jefferson, and so many others. Hidalgo remained interested in French ideas even after Napoleon invaded Iberia. He traveled frequently to Guanajuato and to Allende's hometown, nearby San Miguel. Such cities buzzed with apprehensive conversations in 1810. The catastrophic collapse of Spanish resistance to Napoleon had left only the symbolic, almost literally offshore, Cadiz government intact. Even that might soon vanish. Would Napoleon and the puppet Spanish king Joseph I then try to assert control over New Spain? The case for a junta in New Spain seemed stronger than ever. It did not take many visits from Allende before Hidalgo agreed to join what became known as the Queretaro Conspiracy.