June 2, 1816 - Bolívar Plans Universal Emancipation

Simón Bolívar, who would become known as El Libertador, returned to South America after yet another reversal of fortunes. Bolívar had been born to a wealthy family that lived in luxury thanks to slave labor in mines and plantations outside of Caracas. Bolívar’s parents had both died when he was young, and he as a boy was placed in the care of Hipólita, a nurse-slave, whom the later wrote served as his mother and father. Bolívar was handed to different tutors and uncles through his later youth, traveling Europe while learning the high ideals of the French Revolution as well as the ascendancy of Napoleon. When his wife died after only one year of marriage, he vowed never to marry again and instead turned his attention to independence for Venezuela.

Bolívar lived his philosophical life as a paradox. He quoted Enlightenment writing about the equality of all men, yet he kept slaves and adhered to the strict social structure of birth that ranked him beneath Spanish-born nobles yet above freemen of color. Bolívar considered these social matters and focused his attention on politics, looking to overthrow the crown-appointed officials in favor of elected representatives alongside special hereditary positions.

Upon Napoleon’s invasion of Spain, the colonies were ripe for independence. Juntas and coups broke out in New Granada, but Spanish loyalists were quick to fight back. After serving as a colonel in the First Republic of Venezuela and ending up in retreat to his plantations, Bolívar himself led a campaign in 1813, earning his title of “El Libertador” while marching to establish the Second Republic. He fought on the basis of his “Decree of War to the Death,” vowing to kill anyone who wasn’t an adamant supporter of independence, thus stripping the land of any potential neutrality. By 1814, however, he was fighting fellow republicans, losing momentum against the royalists, and then fleeing to the Caribbean in exile.

After failing to find European support in Jamaica, Bolívar traveled to Haiti and met with President Alexandre Pétion. Bolívar found Haiti a strange and admirable land, the only truly free republic in the world, yet it was thick with racial tension even after the supposed end of social hierarchy with the Rights of Man declared from Paris. Pétion, himself mixed-raced, happily offered aid with 1,000 soldiers and sailors along with weapons and transport on the condition that Bolívar free the slaves of the lands he liberated from Spain. Bolívar readily agreed, though he spent many nights awake pondering how best to do so.

Indebted to Haiti, Bolívar was nevertheless nervous about its sudden upheaval of the social norms. Haiti had won its independence only to turn to civil war between the absolutists maintaining the large plantations in the north under Henri Christophe, who named himself a king, and the troubled democracy in the south where the struggling economy of subsistence farming continued dissidence, prompting Pétion to revise the constitution to make himself an unquestionable President for Life. Bolívar knew he needed to offer liberation to slaves, both African and Native, for honor’s sake. He also needed to support rights of people of color, lest the new republic collapse again as the others had fallen largely due to pardo (mixed-race people) under the command of royalist caudillos like José Tomás Boves. Yet if the social order turned to chaos, he also might lose everything.

Turning to theory for his solution, Bolívar reread his constant companions: Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, the Letters of Voltaire, and Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws. Bolívar needed to preserve the economy from the Wealth of Nations while creating a new government, which could be, according to Montesquieu, a monarchy built on the principle of honor, a republic built on the principle of virtue, or a despotism on the principle of fear. He at last determined to plan a society where honor could be established by means of virtue through service to the state.

Bolívar announced liberation for all slaves who came to serve his campaigns. Men were drafted into the military while women and children worked in support at camps and plantations that had been seized from royalists. As the military victories liberated New Granada, Bolívar pivoted his plans toward keeping up the economy by maintaining the government-owned plantations and mines as major exporting centers where workers elected their foremen and received salaries based on their output. Soon the economy recovered from its struggles, and wealthy landowners found ready competition for labor forces who had ready wages, which attracted men and women of every race.

When Bolívar marched south to liberate Peru and Rio de la Plata, cavalry-commander José Antonio Páez Herrera became the political voice in the new nation of Gran Colombia. Páez held a great deal of popular support but found the new independent government’s position under constant influence of the wealthy and the Catholic Church. Páez, who had grown up the son of a lowly ranked government clerk and literally fought his way to the top, decided to battle them both with expanding the economic opportunities Bolívar’s “virtue” plan had begun through the plantations and mines. Government investment into public works, education, and transportation such as roads, canals, and, later, railroads boosted the middle class while Páez encouraged legal action against the elite whenever they misstepped, such as illegally maintaining slaves or confiscating native land. Mixed-race general José Padilla became an ardent supporter of Páez and rallied the African- and native-descended population to maintain a united Gran Colombia.

Bolívar balked at Padilla, suggesting he threatened to exterminate the upper class, but again Páez was able to maintain peace by balancing one against the other. After Bolívar’s death from tuberculosis in 1830, Páez’s party became the dominant voice in not only Gran Colombia but also through sister-parties in Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina. Gran Colombia would serve as the economic and diplomatic leader of South and Central America as well as much of the Caribbean, proving to be a counterweight against the United States assisting in Spanish colonies gaining independence and joining the Latin Alliance, which itself served as the framework for the United Nations.

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In reality, Bolívar sought to abolish slavery gradually. Initially, freedom was only granted to male slaves who volunteered to join his army. He then worked in 1819 to end the slave trade and in 1821 to emancipate children born to slaves on their eighteenth birthday. Bolívar did free his own slaves soon after the war, making good on his word. True abolition did not come to most South American countries until the 1850s.