Simon Bolivar

Simon Jose Antonio de la Santisima Trinidad Bolivar y Palacios was born on July 24, 1783, in Caracas, then the capital of the Captaincy General of Venezuela within the Spanish Empire. His family belonged to the creole aristocracy and had grown wealthy over generations from cacao plantations, cattle ranches, and copper mines worked by enslaved laborers ^[1]. Wealth did not shield the boy from loss. His father, Juan Vicente Bolivar y Ponte, died before Simon turned three, and his mother, Maria de la Concepcion Palacios, died when he was nine ^[2].

The orphaned Bolivar passed between relatives and tutors. The most influential of these was Simon Rodriguez, an unconventional teacher devoted to the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who introduced his pupil to Enlightenment thought and remained a lifelong friend ^[1]. At fourteen Bolivar entered the militia battalion of white officers in Aragua, following a family tradition of military service.

In 1799 he sailed for Spain to complete his education, as many sons of wealthy creoles did. In Madrid he studied languages, fencing, and dancing, moved in court circles, and in 1802 married Maria Teresa Rodriguez del Toro y Alayza, a young Spanish noblewoman. The couple returned to Venezuela, where Maria Teresa died of yellow fever within a year of the wedding ^[2]. Bolivar, not yet twenty, vowed never to marry again, a promise he kept for the rest of his life.

Grief sent Bolivar back to Europe in 1804. In Paris he witnessed the coronation of Napoleon Bonaparte, an event that impressed him with the power of a single determined leader while repelling him with its imperial trappings ^[1]. Traveling in Italy with his old tutor Rodriguez in 1805, he climbed Monte Sacro in Rome and, by his own later account, swore an oath to free Spanish America from colonial rule ^[3].

The opportunity came sooner than anyone expected. Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808 deposed King Ferdinand VII and threw the empire into confusion. In Caracas, creole leaders formed a junta in April 1810 that expelled the Spanish governor, and Bolivar was sent to London to seek British support. There he met Francisco de Miranda, the veteran revolutionary who had spent decades promoting Spanish American independence, and persuaded him to return home ^[2].

Venezuela declared full independence on July 5, 1811, the first Spanish American colony to do so. The First Republic collapsed within a year under royalist counterattack and a devastating earthquake that struck Caracas in March 1812. Miranda capitulated, and Bolivar, judging the surrender a betrayal, participated in handing him over to Spanish authorities before escaping to Cartagena in New Granada ^[1]. There he wrote the Cartagena Manifesto, an analysis of why the republic had failed that argued for centralized authority and a professional army rather than loose federalism ^[3].

Anyone asking who was Simon Bolivar usually meets him first as a general. In 1813 he led a lightning offensive from New Granada into Venezuela, winning a string of engagements in what became known as the Admirable Campaign and entering Caracas in August, where he received the title of Liberator ^[2]. During this campaign he issued the harsh Decree of War to the Death, which declared that Spaniards who did not actively support independence could be executed, a measure intended to turn a civil conflict into a national war ^[1].

The Second Republic fell in 1814 to royalist forces built around the llanero horsemen of Jose Tomas Boves. Bolivar fled again, first to New Granada and then to Jamaica, where in 1815 he wrote the Jamaica Letter, a survey of the revolution's prospects that predicted independent republics across the continent and remains one of the most studied political documents of the era ^[3]. Refused aid by Britain, he found support in Haiti, whose president Alexandre Petion supplied ships and arms on the condition that Bolivar abolish slavery in the territories he freed. Bolivar issued decrees of emancipation for slaves who joined his army beginning in 1816 ^[4].

The turning point came in 1819. Rather than fight through defended lowlands, Bolivar marched his army from the Venezuelan plains across flooded rivers and over the freezing Andean pass of Pisba, a route the royalists considered impassable. The survivors surprised and defeated the Spanish at the Battle of Boyaca on August 7, 1819, delivering Bogota and New Granada into patriot hands ^[2]. Victory at Carabobo on June 24, 1821, secured Venezuela, and the naval and land campaigns that followed carried the revolution south. Bolivar's lieutenant Antonio Jose de Sucre won at Pichincha in May 1822, freeing Quito, and after Bolivar took command in Peru his forces triumphed at Junin in August 1824. Sucre finished the war at Ayacucho on December 9, 1824, where the Spanish viceroy was captured and continental Spanish power effectively ended ^[1].

Bolivar's ambitions ran beyond winning battles. At the Congress of Angostura in 1819 he delivered an address setting out his constitutional thinking: he admired British institutions, distrusted pure democracy in societies shaped by three centuries of colonial rule, and favored a strong executive balanced by a hereditary senate ^[3]. The congress approved his proposal to unite Venezuela and New Granada, later joined by Quito, into the Republic of Colombia, a state historians call Gran Colombia to distinguish it from the modern country. Bolivar became its first president in 1821, with Francisco de Paula Santander as vice president handling daily administration while the Liberator campaigned ^[2].

Among Simon Bolivar achievements as a lawgiver, the constitution he wrote for the new republic of Bolivia in 1826 is the most revealing. It provided for a president serving for life with the power to name a successor, an arrangement Bolivar defended as a source of stability but which critics read as monarchy in disguise ^[1]. That same year he convened the Congress of Panama, an early attempt at a league of American republics. Only four states sent delegates and the treaties were never ratified widely, yet the gathering is remembered as a forerunner of later hemispheric organizations ^[4].

Holding the union together proved harder than creating it. Venezuelans led by Jose Antonio Paez resented rule from distant Bogota, while Santander's supporters in New Granada opposed Bolivar's centralism. After a constitutional convention at Ocana collapsed in 1828, Bolivar assumed dictatorial powers. On the night of September 25, 1828, conspirators broke into the presidential palace in Bogota to assassinate him, and he escaped through a window with the help of Manuela Saenz, his companion, who confronted the attackers and was afterward called the Liberator of the Liberator ^[2].

Bolivar never remarried after Maria Teresa's death in 1803, and the marriage left no children. His most enduring attachment was to Manuela Saenz, a Quito-born woman he met in 1822 after the liberation of that city. Saenz left her English husband to follow Bolivar through the Peruvian campaigns and the political battles of Bogota, serving as confidante, archivist, and on at least one occasion his rescuer ^[5].

Contemporaries described a slight, wiry man of restless energy, a superb horseman who could dictate correspondence for hours and dance the same evening. He read constantly, favoring Voltaire, Montesquieu, and classical history, and wrote thousands of letters that remain a principal source for the period ^[3]. He was generous to the point of carelessness with money. Having inherited one of Venezuela's great fortunes, he spent nearly all of it on the wars and refused the salary owed him as president more than once, dying with little property beyond the mines he had pledged ^[1].

His views on slavery evolved from convenience to conviction. Raised on the labor of enslaved people, he freed his own slaves and pressed reluctant congresses to enact abolition, telling legislators that it was inconsistent to fight for liberty while holding people in bondage. Full emancipation in the countries he founded came only decades after his death, but the manumission laws of the 1820s began the process ^[4].

The final years brought the collapse of nearly everything Bolivar had built. Peru invaded southern Gran Colombia in 1828 and was repelled, but the union kept fraying. Venezuela moved toward secession under Paez in 1829, and Quito followed as the new state of Ecuador. Worn out and gravely ill with tuberculosis, Bolivar resigned the presidency in early 1830 and prepared to leave for exile in Europe ^[2].

Bad news pursued him down the Magdalena River. In June 1830 assassins in Berruecos murdered Sucre, the friend he had hoped would carry on his work. Bolivar reached the Caribbean coast too weak to travel further. A Spanish admirer, Joaquin de Mier, offered him the estate of Quinta de San Pedro Alejandrino outside Santa Marta, and there he dictated a final proclamation urging Colombians to preserve the union. He died on December 17, 1830, at the age of 47 ^[1].

Among the bitter remarks attributed to his last months is the observation that those who serve a revolution plough the sea, a line recorded by early biographers and repeated ever since as a summary of his disillusion ^[3]. His remains lay in Santa Marta until 1842, when Venezuela brought them home to Caracas with state honors. Since 1876 they have rested in the National Pantheon there ^[5].

Few figures in the Americas match the reach of Bolivar's afterlife. Two countries carry his name, Bolivia and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, along with a currency, a department of Colombia, countless plazas and avenues, and the highest peak in Venezuela ^[4]. Any list of Simon Bolivar facts begins with scale: campaigns fought across terrain stretching from the Caribbean to the silver country of Upper Peru, and six modern nations that trace their independence to armies he led or organized ^[2].

His political reputation has been contested from the start. Liberals of the nineteenth century faulted his late dictatorship and the life presidency of the Bolivian constitution, while admirers answered that he repeatedly surrendered power and died poor. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries governments of very different stripes claimed his banner, most prominently Hugo Chavez, who renamed Venezuela in his honor in 1999 and placed the Liberator at the center of state ideology ^[5]. Scholars continue to debate how well such uses fit the man's own writings, which prized order and feared demagogues.

For readers approaching a Simon Bolivar biography today, the essential point is the combination of soldier and thinker. He won improbable victories like the crossing to Boyaca, and he also produced the Cartagena Manifesto, the Jamaica Letter, and the Angostura Address, documents still assigned in university courses on political thought ^[3]. The republics he founded fell short of his hopes in his lifetime. The independence he won for them did not ^[1].