CHAPTER III
THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE
The beginning of the nineteenth century saw Spain involved to her ruin in the tremendous struggle between Napoleon and his enemies. Her fleets were destroyed at St. Vincent and Trafalgar; her treasury was emptied; her administration demoralised. Free communication with her American colonies was impossible while British frigates commanded every sea, and both on the Peninsula and in America, Spanish subjects lost their traditional respect for the monarchy. Though the jealousy against their imported rulers which always fermented among Creoles was not so strong in quiet, isolated, and agricultural Ecuador as in the coast provinces and mining regions, the news of Spain's defeats and humiliations awakened ambitious lawyers and wealthy landowners to a realisation that the Spaniards might be ousted from the lucrative offices.
The opportunity came in 1809 with the resignation of Charles IV., the deposition and imprisonment of Ferdinand VII., the usurpation of the Spanish throne by Joseph Bonaparte, and the occupation of the Peninsula by the French. The viceroys and governors of Spanish America refused to recognise Joseph. The many patriots on the Peninsula who resisted the French usurpation organised provisional juntas which assumed to be the supreme depositaries of power pending the expulsion of Joseph and the return of Ferdinand, while the Queen claimed a regency for herself. The Spanish authorities did not know who would come out on top and were principally anxious to maintain themselves in their places, while ambitious leaders among the Creoles immediately began to plot to turn the confusion to their own advantage and to secure autonomy and even independence for the colonies.
In 1809 Don Ruiz de Castilla was president of Quito. His jurisdiction included not only all present Ecuador, but also the southern part of Colombia, extending north three hundred miles along the great Andean plateau through the populous regions of Pasto and Popayan and far down the high and fertile valley of the Cauca. These portions of Colombia are continuous with the table-land on which Quito stands and directly accessible therefrom, while they are separated from the parallel series of plateaux on which Bogotá, Tunja, and Socorro lie, by the deep valley of the Magdalena. Castilla's dependence upon the Bogotá viceroy was therefore largely nominal, and he could expect as little help from New Granada as from Peru. He had only a few troops at Quito—probably not more than two or three hundred,—while the governors of the subordinate provinces, Popayan, Guayaquil, and Cuenca, each could muster only a few dozen armed police. A number of wealthy Creole proprietors and restless lawyers determined in the early part of 1809 to overthrow the president and create a governing junta composed of residents of Ecuador. Castilla was powerless to avert the storm. The handful of troops in barracks was easily suborned by the conspirators, who included the persons of greatest wealth, intelligence, and influence in the community. The mass of the Indian population was inert and would naturally side with their landlords, while the Spanish residents and Creole Tories had formed no plans for common action.
On the night of the 9th of August, 1809, the chiefs of the movement, with the officers of the troops, met in the house of Doña Manuela Canizaries, the Madame Roland of Ecuador, and assigned to each the rôle which he was to play in the coup d'état. The officers went to the barracks, led out the troops, and took possession of the government buildings in the name of the revolutionist committee. The president and those Spanish officials who proved recalcitrant were imprisoned, a governing junta of nine with Juan Montufar as chief was appointed, and an open cabildo summoned which confirmed these acts. The junta notified the viceroys of Bogotá and Lima that it had assumed the government, and sent messengers to the provincial capitals demanding that they expel their Spanish authorities, adhere to the new order of things, and recognise the supremacy of the Quito junta. But the movement met with no favourable response from the rest of the presidency. The governors of Popayan, Cuenca, and Guayaquil immediately began to enlist troops to defend themselves against an attack from Quito. The junta prepared for war, but though plenty of ambitious young Creoles volunteered as officers there were not firearms enough to go around. At last an expedition set off to the north against Pasto and Popayan only to be easily defeated by the hasty levies the Spanish authorities had made among the sturdy Indians of those regions. Frightened by this defeat and their hopeless isolation, the junta resigned under promise of amnesty and in October Castilla returned to Quito and resumed the reins of government. But his position was insecure, and rumors of a fresh conspiracy soon drove him to repressive measures and the imprisonment of leading Creoles. The feeling grew bitter and in August, 1810, a desperate effort was made by the Creoles to get possession of the barracks. Its failure was followed by a frightful massacre in which many of the most popular men in the place were murdered.
Meanwhile, the supreme junta at Seville, anxious to pacify the revolutionary disorders, had commissioned Carlos Montufar, a son of the chief of the fallen Quito junta who then happened to be in Spain, to go to Ecuador and reconcile the factions. Under his advice Castilla resigned to a new junta the direction of affairs, taking, however, the position of its chief member, and sent away his troops. In reality the younger Montufar sympathised with his brother Creoles; the universal indignation at the massacre of 1810 pushed him on to vengeance; Spaniards travelling through the country were waylaid and assassinated; and by the time Molina, appointed by the Spanish government in Castilla's place, had reached Cuenca on his way north to Quito, the old governor had again been deposed and imprisoned and open war existed between Arredondo, the Spaniard commanding the troops who had retired from Quito in accordance with the compromise, and the junta in the latter city. The year 1811 passed without any material change in the situation. The Spanish generals controlled Guayaquil and Cuenca in the south and Pasto and Popayan in the north, practically isolating the revolutionary government at Quito. As the troops of both sides became better trained the war took on a more determined and cruel character. Royalists and revolutionists both raised recruits among the sturdy mountain Indians and half-breeds. In technical knowledge of their profession the Spanish officers were superior to the revolutionary leaders and could procure arms more readily. Their armies were usually better disciplined and more efficient, although more liable to depletion by desertion.
In this state of perpetual war, government rapidly became exclusively military. On the surface the contest seemed only a struggle between two sets of independent chiefs, in whose mouths "liberty" and "loyalty" were mere catch-words, and who continually quarrelled among themselves even when they nominally belonged to the same side. Early in 1812 Montufar was overthrown by another Creole chief in Quito who thereupon undertook an expedition against the Spanish general at Cuenca. But sedition among the patriot troops gave an easy victory to the latter, and the Spaniards took the offensive. Marching toward Quito, they dispersed the patriot army at Mocha, and entered the capital in triumph.
Montes, the Spanish general who now became ruler of the presidency, was a wise and moderate man, and spared no pains to conciliate. He soon succeeded in so completely consolidating his power that during nine years Quito and most of the presidency remained quietly submissive, and became one of the centres whence Spanish expeditions went out against the parts of the continent which still remained in revolution. An able general, Samano by name, carried the successes of the Spanish arms to the north, and although the patriots of Colombia obtained some temporary advantages in the winter of 1814-15, they never penetrated south of Pasto. In 1816 the tide again turned with the arrival of eleven thousand Spanish veterans in the north of Colombia. The patriots were soon everywhere defeated, Bogotá itself taken, and a remnant of revolutionists who attempted the invasion of Popayan and Pasto were overwhelmed by Samano in 1816 at the battle of Tambo. The patriot cause was at its lowest ebb in all South America. Resistance ceased in Colombia; only a few scattered bands kept up a desultory warfare in Venezuela; Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia were quiet; Spanish authority had been re-established in Chile; Uruguay had fallen into the hands of the Portuguese king; and Spanish armies were invading the Argentine, the last refuge of the revolution.
San Martin's thunderbolt descent upon Chile and his victory at Chacabuco changed the aspect of affairs. A fleet was improvised at Valparaiso which obtained command of the Pacific coast, cutting off the Spaniards in Ecuador from receiving supplies except overland from the Caribbean ports. Bolivar took new heart for his tedious task of arousing the north and driving the Spaniards from Venezuela and New Granada. In 1819 he climbed the east side of the Andes to the neighbourhood of Bogotá and by defeating the Spanish army at Boyacá, freed most of present Colombia, and even in Quito the patriots renewed their revolutionary plotting. Meanwhile San Martin had completed the expulsion of the Spaniards from Chile, and in 1820 he transported an army by sea to the neighbourhood of Lima itself, opening communications with the anti-Spanish party all along the coast. On the 9th of October, 1820, a successful revolution broke out at Guayaquil, and little time was lost in sending an army to the plateau. The Spaniards defeated it, but with Bolivar threatening them from Colombia, their comrades in Peru fighting for their lives against San Martin, the population of Quito on the verge of a revolt, and the Pacific in the control of the patriots, they could not follow up their advantage.
On June 24, 1821, Bolivar gained the crowning victory of Carabobo in Venezuela. The Spanish position in the Caribbean provinces became irretrievable, and the patriot general was thenceforth free to pursue his plans for the expulsion of the enemy from southern New Granada and Ecuador and their incorporation with Colombia. In the fall of that year General Sucré, who shares with San Martin the honor of being the greatest soldier of the patriot side, arrived at Guayaquil by sea, bringing with him seventeen hundred Colombian and Venezuelan veterans. Bolivar was to advance from Bogotá, conquering Popayan and Pasto on his way to Quito, while Sucré came up from the south. The latter at once ascended the Andes to the plateau, but was badly defeated. Retreating to Guayaquil, he reorganised his army, incorporating with it a reinforcement of twelve hundred men sent by San Martin, and again climbed the Andes. By this time Bolivar was advancing from Popayan to Pasto and the Spaniards, thinking it best to concentrate their forces, abandoned Cuenca and the southern provinces and allowed Sucré to advance unopposed to the neighbourhood of Quito. There he outmanœuvred them and gained a commanding position on the slopes of the great volcano, Pichincha, overlooking the city. His foes were forced to the alternative of giving battle at a disadvantage or permitting him to effect a junction with Bolivar, and overwhelming them by superior numbers. On the morning of the 24th of May, 1822, the battle decisive of Ecuador's fate was fought. The royal army suffered annihilation; four hundred dead lay on the mountainside and two hundred wounded; eleven hundred men and one hundred and sixty officers surrendered the following day. The only troops who escaped belonged to scattered detachments not present at the battle, who fled down the eastern slope of the Andes into the trackless forests and finally made their way down the Amazon to the Atlantic.
