XI
The system adopted by Spain for the government of her vast colonial possessions is set forth in the famous code known as the Compilation of Laws of the Kingdoms of the Indies, framed in the reign of Philip IV and published in 1680 in the reign of Charles II. The American possessions had originally been divided into two great political entities by the Emperor Charles V in 1542. These were known as New Spain and New Castile and were governed only by Real Audiencias, (royal audiences, or tribunals that had both legislative and judicial functions). Later they were created Viceroyalties, and the name New Castile was changed to Peru. “We order and decree,” said the King in Law 1, Title 3, Book III of the Compilation, “that the Kingdoms of Peru and New Spain be ruled and governed by Viceroys who shall represent our royal person. These shall exercise superior power, do and administer justice equally to all our subjects and vassals and apply themselves to all that will promote the tranquillity, repose, ennoblement and pacification of these provinces.”
At that time the Viceroyalty of New Spain embraced all the provinces of Central America and the islands of the Caribbean, and Mexico and (west of the Mississippi) pretty much all the land to the north, and in the Viceroyalty of Peru were included Panama and all the land in South America, except, of course, Brazil. These viceroyalties themselves were subdivided into great provincial districts, each administered by a Real Audiencia. These audiencia districts were in turn divided into lesser governmental jurisdictions known as Gobernaciones (provincial sub-districts), Alcaldias Mayores, Alcaldias Ordinarias and Corregimientos (municipal districts of greater and lesser extent), and, in harmony with this political arrangement, there was also an ecclesiastical division: into Archbishoprics, coextensive with the audiencia districts, Bishoprics, corresponding with the gobernaciones and alcaldias mayores; and Parishes and Curacies, corresponding with the alcaldias ordinarias and corregimientos. The Viceroys were respectively Presidents of the Audiencias and Captains-General of the military forces at Lima and the City of Mexico, the viceregal capitals; the provincial audiencia districts were presided over by Gowned Presidents (Ministros Togado) and were under the military command of Captains-General, both of which officers were subordinate to the Viceroys.
Within the jurisdiction of the Viceroy of Peru were seven royal audiencias: Panama (created in 1535), Lima (created in 1542), Santa Fé de Bogotá, now Colombia (created in 1549), Charcas, now Bolivia (created in 1559), San Francisco de Quito, now Ecuador (created in 1563), Chile (created in 1609) and Buenos Aires, now Argentina (created in 1661). In the eighteenth century two more viceroyalties were created from districts withdrawn from the Viceroyalty of Peru: New Granada and Buenos Aires. That of New Granada, established in 1717, was made up of the Audiencias of Santa Fé de Bogotá, Panama, San Francisco de Quito and Venezuela; that of Buenos Aires, established in 1778, included the territory now embraced in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Patagonia, Bolivia (Charcas) and the southern part of Chile. Afterward the Audiencias of Venezuela and Chile were constituted independent Captaincies-General, subordinate only to the Council of the Indies in Spain, and the Audiencia of Charcas was returned by royal decree of 1810 to the Viceroyalty of Peru. From these colonial divisions logically sprang the South American republics as they exist to-day—of course, again excepting Brazil, which, after she had secured her independence in 1822, retained a monarchial form of government until 1889, when she became a republic like the others.
Under this Spanish colonial system, therefore, the King was absolute sovereign, and governed, not through his ministers of the cabinet—for the various provinces were regarded as appanages of the Crown—but primarily through his Council of the Indies, to which his officers in America reported directly, and secondarily through these officers themselves—the Viceroys and Captains-General, and their subordinates. In addition to these executive officers and the royal audiences, there were Cabildos (municipal councils), which had jurisdiction of local affairs in their respective communities, but there were no elective officers or tribunals, or legislative bodies representing the people. The King regarded the provinces as his personal property and their occupants as instruments for their development for his benefit alone. Incidentally, they might derive for themselves what profit out of it they could, but only in ways consistent with his interests and policies.
Consequently, during this colonial period, the Spanish Americans had no opportunity to develop a representative and self-sustaining body politic, which, in the course of time, might by peaceful means have altered this theory and corrected the evils of such a system—as was the case in Brazil, where the Portuguese King in person resided in the country for several years (during the period of Napoleon’s Peninsula invasion) and in that way became familiar with local conditions and the needs of his people. He, on his return to Portugal, opened the Brazilian ports to the commerce of the world and created Brazil a vassal kingdom, with a form of government almost wholly autonomous.
In contrast with this, no Spaniard (and certainly no foreign trader) was allowed to freight ships for the colonies, or to buy a pound of goods anywhere else, without obtaining special permission and paying well for the privilege. Cadiz was the only port in Europe from which ships were permitted to sail for America, and the whole trade was farmed out to a ring of Cadiz merchants. Every port in Spanish South America was closed to transatlantic traffic except Nombre de Dios on the Caribbean side of the Isthmus of Panamá, near the present city of Colon. Not a merchant ship could enter Buenos Aires, Valparaiso, Callao or Guayaquil. Imports from Spain must first go to the Isthmus, there be disembarked and transported over the Andean passes and the Bolivian plateaux on the backs of llamas, and finally be carried down over the Argentina pampas to Buenos Aires, or along the arid coast to the Peruvian and Chilean settlements. Under such conditions in the southern provinces European manufactures, agricultural and mining implements, and other essentials for a people’s advancement were to be had only at fabulous prices.
On the other hand, also, the system made exports impossible, except the precious metals mined in the north, and drugs, and other easily transportable products. Hides, hair, wool, agricultural products and hard woods would not stand the cost of such long and difficult hauls. The Peninsula authorities acted upon the theory that America should be confined to producing gold and silver. The Plata settlements, especially, and all others south and east of the Peruvian-Bolivian mining region, suffered from this ruinous suppression. Having no mines, they were considered worthless, so far as the royal treasury was concerned, and were in consequence ignored—until they came in conflict with home industries by the cultivation of olives and grapes, and then, to protect the Peninsula growers, the Argentinos were forced to cut down their olive trees and uproot their vines. The inevitable results followed. Smuggling, bribe-giving, evasion and contempt for all law, and hostility to the fiscal authorities of the Peninsula grew up when, in their stead, the colonists could have been developed into a bulwark for Spain, which was so soon to totter from her proud position as the greatest of the world powers. Where science of government and national up-building should have been taught and fostered, revolution became the only political refuge.
In 1808, when Napoleon forced the abdication of Charles IV, held him and his successor, Ferdinand VII, prisoners in France, and established his brother Joseph on the throne, came the colonists’ opportunity. In April, 1809, a Junta (national assembly) was formed in Caracas; in July of the same year the example was followed in Peru, and in August at Quito; in May of the next year, Santa Fé de Bogotá and Buenos Aires followed, and Santiago elected the Chilean Junta in September. The colonists expected by these steps to release the Indians from slavery in the mines in the north and west; to restore and develop the cultivation of grapes, olives and tobacco, and build up their grazing and agricultural industry in the south and east; also to open their ports to commerce with Europe, so that they might buy commodities essential to their growth, and export their own products by way of exchange; also to lighten the crushing imposts and internal taxation, to abolish the tithe system, and reclaim and parcel out the vast feudal estates which had gradually been absorbed by the Spanish officials in the course of an administration which could only be likened to that of the rapacious Roman proconsuls against which Cicero inveighed so impotently.
But the ambitious attempts at reform met with immediate and successful opposition. The country was full of Spanish office-holders who saw in them their dismissal and the death blow to their spoils system. In the short struggle that followed, the success of the royal forces was almost universal. The colonists had had no training in warfare, nor had they yet developed as a people the unity of purpose and sturdy self-dependence which was eventually to bring them their freedom. The junta governments were everywhere effectively suppressed, except in Bogotá and Buenos Aires, where the fires of revolution smouldered during the succeeding years of Peninsula chaos that preceded Waterloo, and the colonists, with eyes opened at last to the true and only remedy for their ills, were formulating their great resolve to separate themselves entirely from the mother country; for, while their measures of reform had been suppressed, the ideas that called them into being could not be obliterated. Furthermore their unsuccessful clash with the viceroys and lesser officials brought even more glaringly before their eyes the extortions and brutal indifference of the ruling class. The attitude of the Peninsulares toward the creoles and mestizos of the colonies had always been contemptuous, and now at last the creoles, being for the most part of unmixed Spanish descent (they were called creoles only because born in America) found their resentment of that attitude more than they could endure.
The series of military successes that was destined to lead to the desired result began with the fights at Tucumán in the northern part of Argentina, in the fall of 1812, and at Salta, a little farther north, in February, 1813. By these battles the persistent efforts of the royalist forces in Peru to put an end, to the junta government of 1810 in the Plata settlements, were checked under the leadership of Manuel Belgrano. But on the first of October following, the Royalists, in violation of the armistice entered into after Salta, almost destroyed Belgrano’s army at Vilcapujio. Disastrous as was the reverse for the time-being, this before long proved a distinct service to the colonists, for it placed in command of the remnants of Belgrano’s army General José de San Martín, one of the two great patriots who finally brought the war to a successful issue, and who had then just returned with the experience and prestige acquired by twenty years’ service in the Peninsula armies against Napoleon’s famous marshals. The other of these great patriots was Simon Bolívar.
San Martín recognized at once the futility of pursuing the campaign and attacking the Royalists in the mountainous regions of Bolivia, with over a thousand miles of difficult roads between his army and base of supplies. He conceived, therefore, the idea of compelling Spain to defend her own bases at Lima and Callao, and to this end elaborated a plan for the invasion of Chile and capture of Valparaiso, and, from thence, a combined military and naval attack on the capital of Peru, the seat of Spain’s continental power. With this purpose in view, he repaired to the almost inaccessible town of Mendoza on the Argentine slope of the Andes, on about the same parallel with the Chilean capital, Santiago, and remained there two years, recruiting and training a strong force and accumulating equipment.
Shortly after he had established his camp of instruction, the Chileans under General Bernardo O’Higgins had extorted from the Royalist General at Talca a truce whereby the protracted struggle to maintain the junta government in Chile was for the moment suspended. This truce of Talca, however, was repudiated by the Viceroy at Lima, and General Ossorio was soon on his way south with another Royalist army, against which, weakened by local political dissensions, the Chilenos were unable to prevail, and were decisively beaten at Rancagua in October, 1814. As this meant a complete restoration of Spanish authority in Chile, O’Higgins and a few of his officers made their escape with the wreck of their army, crossed the Andes and placed themselves under the command of San Martín.
In January, 1817, San Martín’s army, four thousand strong, was ready to move against the unsuspecting Spanish in Chile, who had been led by a stratagem to believe that he would enter the country through one of the more easily accessible of the Andean passes to the south. San Martín, however, chose the highest and most terrible of them all, one four thousand feet higher than St. Bernard, and which lay to the north instead of south of Aconcagua, and accomplished a feat which, in endurance and skill, is thought by the historians to have surpassed Napoleon’s famous crossing of the Alps. Descending the western slope, he fell upon the Spanish outpost at La Guardia on the 7th of February, and on the 12th, surprised and defeated Ossorio’s main force at Chacabuco. Two days later the liberating army entered Santiago. The patriot government was at once re-established and the directorship conferred on O’Higgins after San Martín, refusing to be diverted from his plans for the liberation of the entire continent, had declined the honor.
On the first day of the ensuing year the independence of Chile was proclaimed. De facto independence was not achieved until the decisive defeat of the Royalists on the plains of Maypú, on the 5th of April, 1815, and then, with Chile cleared of Spanish troops, and the port of Valparaiso at his service as a base of supplies, San Martín was ready to enter upon the next stage of his work—the liberation of Peru.
SAN MARTÍN’S PASSAGE OF THE ANDES—FROM VILA’S FAMOUS PAINTING.
Another period devoted to recruiting, organizing, and drilling elapsed. In August, 1820, his combined military and naval expedition set out from Valparaiso with some 4500 troops. Thus far this stronghold of Spain had undergone less violent revolutionary disturbances than any other part of her American possessions. In 1820 it was fully under the control of Don Joaquín de la Pezuela, the forty-fourth successor of Pizarro. But it was three years now since Pezuela had reported to the Madrid government that he stood over a volcano liable to burst into action at any moment, and had received no aid, a situation San Martín understood. In this expedition he was ably seconded by Lord Cochrane, a former British naval officer, who was to render most valuable service in the naval warfare that was at once begun against the Viceroy. Cochrane’s first success was the capture of Valdivia, Spain’s best harbor on the Pacific south of Valparaiso, in spite of the fact that his rockets were filled with sand instead of powder, the Chilean authorities having imprudently employed Spanish prisoners in the manufacture of ammunition.
Arrived off Callao, the seaport of Lima, the liberators entered upon operations and negotiations lasting several months, during which effective missionary work in the cause of independence was done throughout Peru by San Martín’s lieutenants. At last, on the 6th of July, 1821, the Spanish leaders, neglected by their home government, and realizing the ineffectiveness of their forces, evacuated Lima, which was at once occupied by San Martín. He did not come, he said, as a conqueror, and it was with much hesitation that he accepted the supreme power offered by the patriots; he styled himself Protector of Peru, promising to surrender the government to the people as soon as the Peruvian congress should be assembled to take over the burden, and retained his control of the embryo republic for a year, notwithstanding the hostility that was engendered by misconception of the high purposes embodied in the title he assumed. The wisdom of his retention in power at such a critical period is hardly to be contested.
This was the decisive campaign of the war of independence on the continent. The future of Buenos Aires and Chile, of New Granada and Venezuela, and of all the Spanish settlements depended on the battles that were now to be fought in the mountains of Peru, where the Royalist forces had concentrated, for this was the very heart of the Spanish stronghold. San Martín was not to fight these final battles, but to him is due the credit of conceiving the plan of action, of executing it almost to the end, and of showing, by his retirement in favor of a more convincingly popular fellow-patriot of the north, a modesty, soundness of judgment, and generosity almost unparalleled among statesmen—for in the meantime the northern movement, under the direction of Simon Bolívar, was approaching Peru. It arrived at the coast town of Guayaquil in the spring of 1822. San Martín immediately repaired to that port for a conference, leaving his administration in the hands of the Marquis of Torre Tagle, a member of the old nobility who had turned revolutionist, and Bernardo Monteagudo.
The meeting of the two Liberators marked the close of San Martín’s military career. He saw clearly that there could be no room for himself and a brilliant, ambitious, magnetic leader like Bolívar in the same sphere of action, that it was necessary for the welfare of the common cause that one of them should retire. He was great and patriotic enough to make the sacrifice. Returning to Lima, he resigned the supreme authority and retired to Europe. There was no place for him in Buenos Aires, except as a leader in the civil wars which by this time were distracting the country, and this rôle he disdained. In 1850 he died in France at the age of seventy-two, after a thirty years’ struggle with sickness and poverty, but attended always by his devoted daughter. After his death his body was brought to Buenos Aires and reverently placed in a tomb, one of the handsomest in the world, about which stand three marble figures representing Buenos Aires, Chile, and Peru.
Bolívar’s career had begun in Venezuela, where he was born. After Spain’s suppression of the junta established in Caracas in 1810, Bolívar, with the revolutionist Miranda, had landed in Venezuela and called into being the first congress of the people, and the independence of the country was proclaimed. In the fighting that followed, the movement thus started met a speedy end—literally shattered by an awful earthquake that occurred on Holy Thursday of 1812, which the Royalists claimed was a stroke of Divine vengeance against those who would have overthrown the anointed of the Lord.
Miranda was captured and ended his days in a Spanish prison, but Bolívar escaped into New Granada and soon had full sway in the revolutionary councils of the northern provinces. In 1813 he founded at Bogotá an active revolutionary junta and a military organization. With the latter he struck the Royalists at Cucutá, just within the eastern border of Colombia, and passed over the mountains to Caracas, proclaiming war to the death. Here his rôle of Dictator began. His career, however, was punctuated by many disasters before the decisive battle of Boyacá placed Bogotá permanently in his hands and gave assurance of eventual success. But from this triumph Bolívar hurried to the revolutionary congress he had some time before called at Angostura and procured the enactment of a law providing for the union of Venezuela and New Granada, to form the Republic of Colombia, and was elected President; and by the end of the year 1821 all of this territory, except Panama and Puerto Cabello, near La Guayra, had been freed from the control of Spain.
The famous battle of Pichincha, won on the 24th of May, 1822, by Bolívar’s great lieutenant, Antonio José de Sucre, gave Ecuador also to the northern federation; later it was formally incorporated into the new Colombian Republic. Still for two years the final clash between the Royalists and the patriots was deferred, during which time the confusion of sectional interests and negotiations by the now desperate mother country threatened to undo the great work of the liberators. But once more Bolívar triumphed. By the withdrawal in his favor of San Martín, harmony was restored; with his victory at Junín on the 6th of August, 1824, and the decisive battle on the plain of Ayacucho, midway between Lima and Cuzco, on the 9th of December, the war came to an end. In that brilliantly fought battle the patriot army, again under Sucre, defeated a largely superior force commanded by the Viceroy in person in less than eighty minutes. The Viceroy wounded and a prisoner, and his men having deserted by hundreds, his second in command sued for terms, and that afternoon fourteen generals, five hundred and sixty-eight officers of other grades, and three thousand two hundred privates became prisoners of war.
STATUE OF BOLÍVAR, LIMA.
Following this victory, Sucre proceeded to Charcas and convened the patriot congress which in August, 1825, proclaimed the Republic of Bolívia, and became its first President. Bolívar was then at the head of affairs in Peru. He soon, however, relinquished his dictatorship and returned to Bogotá to resume, for a brief term, his functions as President of the federation of Colombia. From that time on he sank rapidly from his apogee and, beset on all sides by the enemies his supposed imperial designs had made for him, died on his estate of Santa Marta on the 17th of December, 1830, at the early age of forty-seven. Disheartened, his personal fortune gone, he had abandoned any designs of that character he might once have had and only a few days before the end wrote to the Colombians: “My last wishes are for the country’s happiness. If my death can contribute to the quieting of party strife and to the consolidation of the union, I shall go down to the grave in peace.” To him also in after years his people erected monuments in tardy recognition of his matchless services.
The Portuguese provinces were the only ones to continue the monarchical system. They too, however, declared themselves independent, and became known as the Empire of Brazil, until 1889, when the present republic was declared.