Part 2 (1/2)

Very different was the vision of Bolivar. While a refugee in Jamaica he wrote: ”We are a little human species; we possess a world apart... new in almost all the arts and sciences, and yet old, after a fas.h.i.+on, in the uses of civil society.... Neither Indians nor Europeans, we are a species that lies midway .... Is it conceivable that a people recently freed of its chains can launch itself into the sphere of liberty without shattering its wings, like Icarus, and plunging into the abyss? Such a prodigy is inconceivable, never beheld.” Toward the close of his career he declared: ”The majority are mestizos, mulattoes, Indians, and negroes. An ignorant people is a blunt instrument for its own destruction. To it liberty means license, patriotism means disloyalty, and justice means vengeance.” ”Independence,” he exclaimed, ”is the only good we have achieved, at the cost of everything else.”

Whether the abounding confidence of the prophecy or the anxious doubt of the vision would come true, only the future could tell. In 1822, at all events, optimism was the watchword and the total exclusion of Spain from South America the goal of Bolivar and his lieutenants, as they started southward to complete the work of emanc.i.p.ation which had been begun by San Martin.

The patriots of Peru, indeed, had fallen into straits so desperate that an appeal to the Liberator offered the only hope of salvation. While the royalists under their able and vigilant leader, Jose Canterac, continued to strengthen their grasp upon the interior of the country and to uphold the power of the viceroy, the President chosen by the Congress had been driven by the enemy from Lima. A number of the legislators in wrath thereupon declared the President deposed. Not to be outdone, that functionary on his part declared the Congress dissolved. The malcontents immediately proceeded to elect a new chief magistrate, thus bringing two Presidents into the field and inaugurating a spectacle destined to become all too common in the subsequent annals of Spanish America.

When Bolivar arrived at Callao, the seaport of Lima, in September, 1823, he acted with prompt vigor. He expelled one President, converted the other into a pa.s.sive instrument of his will, declined to promulgate a const.i.tution that the Congress had prepared, and, after obtaining from that body an appointment to supreme command, dissolved the Congress without further ado. Unfortunately none of these radical measures had any perceptible effect upon the military situation. Though Bolivar gathered together an army made up of Colombians, Peruvians, and remnants of San Martin's force, many months elapsed before he could venture upon a serious campaign. Then events in Spain played into his hands. The reaction that had followed the restoration of Ferdinand VII to absolute power crossed the ocean and split the royalists into opposing factions.

Quick to seize the chance thus afforded, Bolivar marched over the Andes to the plain of Junin. There, on August 6, 1824, he repelled an onslaught by Canterac and drove that leader back in headlong flight.

Believing, however, that the position he held was too perilous to risk an offensive, he entrusted the military command to Sucre and returned to headquarters.

The royalists had now come to realize that only a supreme effort could save them. They must overwhelm Sucre before reinforcements could reach him, and to this end an army of upwards of ten thousand was a.s.sembled.

On the 9th of December it encountered Sucre and his six thousand soldiers in the valley of Ayacucho, or ”Corner of Death,” where the patriot general had entrenched his army with admirable skill. The result was a total defeat for the royalists--the Waterloo of Spain in South America. The battle thus won by ragged and hungry soldiers--whose countersign the night before had been ”bread and cheese”--threw off the yoke of the mother country forever. The viceroy fell wounded into their hands and Canterac surrendered. On receipt of the glorious news, the people of Lima greeted Bolivar with wild enthusiasm. A Congress prolonged his dictators.h.i.+p amid adulations that bordered on the grotesque.

Eastward of Peru in the vast mountainous region of Charcas, on the very heights of South America, the royalists still found a refuge. In January, 1825, a patriot general at the town of La Paz undertook on his own responsibility to declare the entire province independent, alike of Spain, Peru, and the United Provinces of La Plata. This action was too precipitous, not to say presumptuous, to suit Bolivar and Sucre. The better to control the situation, the former went up to La Paz and the latter to Chuquisaca, the capital, where a Congress was to a.s.semble for the purpose of imparting a more orderly turn to affairs. Under the direction of the ”Marshal of Ayacucho,” as Sucre was now called, the Congress issued on the 6th of August a formal declaration of independence. In honor of the Liberator it christened the new republic ”Bolivar”--later Latinized into ”Bolivia”--and conferred upon him the presidency so long as he might choose to remain. In November, 1896, a new Congress which had been summoned to draft a const.i.tution accepted, with slight modifications, an instrument that the Liberator himself had prepared. That body also renamed the capital ”Sucre” and chose the hero of Ayacucho as President of the republic.

Now, the Liberator thought, was the opportune moment to impose upon his territorial namesake a const.i.tution embodying his ideas of a stable government which would give Spanish Americans eventually the political experience they needed. Providing for an autocracy represented by a life President, it ran the gamut of aristocracy and democracy, all the way from ”censors” for life, who were to watch over the due enforcement of the laws, down to senators and ”tribunes” chosen by electors, who in turn were to be named by a select citizenry. Whenever actually present in the territory of the republic, the Liberator was to enjoy supreme command, in case he wished to exercise it.

In 1826 Simon Bolivar stood at the zenith of his glory and power. No adherents of the Spanish regime were left in South America to menace the freedom of its independent states. In January a resistance kept up for nine years by a handful of royalists lodged on the remote island of Chiloe, off the southern coast of Chile, had been broken, and the garrison at the fortress of Callao had laid down its arms after a valiant struggle. Among Spanish Americans no one was comparable to the marvelous man who had founded three great republics stretching from the Caribbean Sea to the Tropic of Capricorn. Hailed as the ”Liberator”

and the ”Terror of Despots,” he was also acclaimed by the people as the ”Redeemer, the First-Born Son of the New World!” National destinies were committed to his charge, and equestrian statues were erected in his honor. In the popular imagination he was ranked with Napoleon as a peerless conqueror, and with Was.h.i.+ngton as the father of his country.

That megalomania should have seized the mind of the Liberator under circ.u.mstances like these is not strange.

Ever a zealous advocate of large states, Bolivar was an equally ardent partisan of confederation. As president of three republics--of Colombia actually, and of its satellites, Peru and Bolivia, through his lieutenants--he could afford now to carry out the plan that he had long since cherished of a.s.sembling at the town of Panama, on Colombian soil, an ”august congress” representative of the independent countries of America. Here, on the isthmus created by nature to join the continents, the nations created by men should foregather and proclaim fraternal accord. Presenting to the autocratic governments of Europe a solid front of resistance to their pretensions as well as a visible symbol of unity in sentiment, such a Congress by meeting periodically would also promote friends.h.i.+p among the republics of the western hemisphere and supply a convenient means of settling their disputes.

At this time the United States was regarded by its sister republics with all the affection which grat.i.tude for services rendered to the cause of emanc.i.p.ation could evoke. Was it not itself a republic, its people a democracy, its development astounding, and its future radiant with hope? The p.r.o.nouncement of President Monroe, in 1823, protesting against interference on the part of European powers with the liberties of independent America, afforded the clearest possible proof that the great northern republic was a natural protector, guide, and friend whose advice and cooperation ought to be invoked. The United States was accordingly asked to take part in the a.s.sembly--not to concert military measures, but simply to join its fellows to the southward in a solemn proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine by America at large and to discuss means of suppressing the slave trade.

The Congress that met at Panama, in June, 1826, afforded scant encouragement to Bolivar's roseate hope of interAmerican solidarity.

Whether because of the difficulties of travel, or because of internal dissensions, or because of the suspicion that the megalomania of the Liberator had awakened in Spanish America, only the four continental countries nearest the isthmus--Mexico, Central America, Colombia, and Peru--were represented. The delegates, nevertheless, signed a compact of ”perpetual union, league, and confederation,” provided for mutual a.s.sistance to be rendered by the several nations in time of war, and arranged to have the Areopagus of the Americas transferred to Mexico.

None of the acts of this Congress was ratified by the republics concerned, except the agreement for union, which was adopted by Colombia.

Disheartening to Bolivar as this spectacle was, it proved merely the first of a series of calamities which were to overshadow the later years of the Liberator. His grandiose political structure began to crumble, for it was built on the s.h.i.+fting sands of a fickle popularity. The more he urged a general acceptance of the principles of his autocratic const.i.tution, the surer were his followers that he coveted royal honors.

In December he imposed his instrument upon Peru. Then he learned that a meeting in Venezuela, presided over by Paez, had declared itself in favor of separation from Colombia. Hardly had he left Peru to check this movement when an uprising at Lima deposed his representative and led to the summons of a Congress which, in June, 1827, restored the former const.i.tution and chose a new President. In Quito, also, the government of the unstable dictator was overthrown.

Alarmed by symptoms of disaffection which also appeared in the western part of the republic, Bolivar hurried to Bogota. There in the hope of removing the growing antagonism, he offered his ”irrevocable”

resignation, as he had done on more than one occasion before. Though the malcontents declined to accept his withdrawal from office, they insisted upon his calling a const.i.tutional convention. Meeting at Ocana, in April, 1828, that body proceeded to abolish the life tenure of the presidency, to limit the powers of the executive, and to increase those of the legislature. Bolivar managed to quell the opposition in dictatorial fas.h.i.+on; but his prestige had by this time fallen so low that an attempt was made to a.s.sa.s.sinate him. The severity with which he punished the conspirators served only to diminish still more the popular confidence which he had once enjoyed. Even in Bolivia his star of destiny had set. An outbreak of Colombian troops at the capital forced the faithful Sucre to resign and leave the country. The const.i.tution was then modified to meet the demand for a less autocratic government, and a new chief magistrate was installed.

Desperately the Liberator strove to ward off the impending collapse.

Though he recovered possession of the division of Quito, a year of warfare failed to win back Peru, and he was compelled to renounce all pretense of governing it. Feeble in body and distracted in mind, he condemned bitterly the machinations of his enemies. ”There is no good faith in Colombia,” he exclaimed, ”neither among men nor among nations.

Treaties are paper; const.i.tutions, books; elections, combats; liberty, anarchy, and life itself a torment.”

But the hardest blow was yet to fall. Late in December, 1829, an a.s.sembly at Caracas declared Venezuela a separate state. The great republic was rent in twain, and even what was left soon split apart.

In May, 1830, came the final crash. The Congress at Bogota drafted a const.i.tution, providing for a separate republic to bear the old Spanish name of ”New Granada,” accepted definitely the resignation of Bolivar, and granted him a pension. Venezuela, his native land, set up a congress of its own and demanded that he be exiled. The division of Quito declared itself independent, under the name of the ”Republic of the Equator” (Ecuador). Everywhere the artificial handiwork of the Liberator lay in ruins. ”America is ungovernable. Those who have served in the revolution have ploughed the sea,” was his despairing cry.

Stricken to death, the fallen hero retired to an estate near Santa Marta. Here, like his famous rival, San Martin, in France, he found hospitality at the hands of a Spaniard. On December 17, 1830, the Liberator gave up his troubled soul.

While Bolivar's great republic was falling apart, the United Provinces of La Plata had lost practically all semblance of cohesion. So broad were their notions of liberty that the several provinces maintained a substantial independence of one another, while within each province the caudillos, or partisan chieftains, fought among themselves.

Buenos Aires alone managed to preserve a measure of stability. This comparative peace was due to the financial and commercial measures devised by Bernardino Rivadavia, one of the most capable statesmen of the time, and to the energetic manner in which disorder was suppressed by Juan Manuel de Rosas, commander of the gaucho, or cowboy, militia.

Thanks also to the former leader, the provinces were induced in 1826 to join in framing a const.i.tution of a unitary character, which vested in the administration at Buenos Aires the power of appointing the local governors and of controlling foreign affairs. The name of the country was at the same time changed to that of the ”Argentine Confederation”(c)-a Latin rendering of ”La Plata.”