CHAPTER III
THE WAR AGAINST SPAIN
The stirring events of the year 1808 in Spain and the disorganisation of the monarchy produced great excitement in the New Granadan cities. When the news of the establishment of a junta at Quito came in September of the following year, Amar, the Bogotá viceroy, summoned an assembly of the authorities and leading citizens for consultation. The Creoles favoured an independent junta, but the prestige of the Spaniards and Amar's popularity prevailed, and it was resolved to recognise the home revolutionary government, and to send an expedition to crush the Quito junta. Meanwhile the Ecuador patriots had despatched troops to Pasto, but the sturdy conservative mountaineers resented the invasion and repulsed the Quiteños. Thenceforth to the end of the war Pasto remained a loyalist stronghold. Though Quito soon laid down its arms under promise of amnesty, the re-established Spanish government massacred the insurgent leaders, and reports of these cruelties threw the Creoles of the cities into effervescence, though the Indian and negro population of the rural districts remained indifferent. On May 22, 1810, the citizens of Cartagena demanded and obtained an independent revolutionary junta; shortly after an insurrection broke out among the llaneros on the Orinoco plains north-east of Bogotá; on the 4th of July Pamplona followed Cartagena's example and set up its own junta; and a little later Socorro did likewise. By this time things were ripe in Bogotá for an anti-Spanish revolution. Ambitious Creoles intrigued among the people; the natural feeling of jealousy and hatred between Spaniards and Americans became inflamed; a contemptuous remark about Creoles made by a Spaniard in the streets was the signal for the gathering of a great mob which rushed tumultuously to the public square and howled for an open cabildo and the immediate appointment of a junta. With six thousand armed men in front of his palace the viceroy had no choice. The junta was named and a circular sent to the other cities inviting them to name deputies for a congress to arrange a federal union. But local jealousies, hardly held in check by the rigid colonial system, now flamed forth; the people instinctively grouped along geographical lines; and divergencies of opinion and ambition among leaders increased the confusion. Cartagena and other provinces declined to send delegates to Bogotá, preferring to act independently until the re-establishment of regular government in Spain.
When the congress met it represented only a part of the territory, and but a small percentage of the population. Nariño and other popular young leaders in Bogotá intrigued for a centralised system in which Bogotá was to be master province. An insurrection against the junta installed him as dictator, and congress fled from the capital. The royalists had made no effort to oppose the revolution in the centres of population, contenting themselves with sending expeditions from Quito to occupy Pasto and Popayan, with keeping possession of the Isthmus, and establishing themselves on the lower Magdalena. Cartagena was thereby isolated from the rest of the revolted provinces, and Bogotá cut off from communication with the sea. In March, 1811, the patriots marched up the Cauca from Cali and defeated the Spaniards in Popayan. Quito rose in rebellion a second time, and the Ecuadoreans advanced north into Pasto, only to be beaten once more by the loyalist peasantry. The Granadans, who invaded by way of Popayan, met with no better success, and their forces under the command of a North American adventurer, Macaulay, were annihilated. The re-establishment of the royal authority at Quito followed, and Bogotá again lay open to attack from the south.
While the royalist reaction was thus closing in around the revolution in central New Granada, the mass of the people cooled, the patriot leaders fought among themselves, and the interior was a prey to anarchy. Dictator Nariño had broken completely with the ambulatory congress, and was sending his troops into the adjacent provinces. Congress protested and a civil war broke out in central Granada. Nariño was defeated in an attack on Socorro, but the federalists were in their turn repulsed when they lay siege to the capital, and Bogotá declared itself an independent state. In the midst of these disorders, the alarming news was received that General Samano, advancing from Quito and Pasto, at the head of two thousand well-equipped men, had retaken Popayan, and was already menacing Antioquia and the lower Cauca. In the face of this common danger Nariño and congress came to terms. The latter advanced to meet Samano and badly defeated him at the battle of Calivio, January 15, 1814. The re-occupation of Popayan was the only result of this victory. Pasto remained faithfully loyalist—a Vendee into which many republican armies were destined to dash in vain. The Spaniards brought up reinforcements, and when Nariño again advanced his army was overwhelmed and himself captured. However, the loyalists were not able to equip an army large enough to justify undertaking the conquest of central Granada, so the jarring factions and provinces were left alone for the present to waste their energies in internecine conflicts.
ROPE BRIDGE OVER THE MAGDALENA RIVER.
Cartagena had all the while remained independent, and in 1813 Bolivar, flying from his native Venezuela after the suppression of its first insurrection, took service with the Granadan city. With a handful of militia he drove the Spaniards from the lower Magdalena, and retook the important city of Ocana near the Venezuelan border. His unexpected success created such enthusiasm that the Cartagena dictator gave him a small body of regulars, and with them the daring Venezuelan began that marvellous campaign which for the second time expelled the Spaniards from Venezuela. His triumph was shortlived, and by September, 1814, his forces had been dispersed by the loyalist llaneros and he was back in New Granada. He now offered his services to the federated provinces, and in spite of his recent defeats, the prestige of the 1813 campaign secured him the command of the army which was about to march on Bogotá to force that recalcitrant province into the union. At the head of eighteen hundred men Bolivar prosecuted the campaign with all his usual activity. The outlying towns of the province surrendered at his approach, and the capital itself, which had been denuded of troops by Nariño for his ill-fated expedition against Pasto, and which in fact was tired of the dictatorship, could not make much resistance. The seat of the federal government was transferred to Bogotá, and the victorious general, though a Venezuelan, became captain-general of its forces, and to his title of "Liberator" was added that of "Illustrious Pacificator." If the adhesion of Cartagena could be secured, the union of New Granada would be well-nigh complete; so with two thousand men he proceeded to the lower Magdalena and established his headquarters just above the delta and within striking distance of the sea-port. However, his intrigues with its government led to nothing. Cartagena refused to co-operate with the confederation on any terms, and finally Bolivar made a foolish attempt to besiege the strongest fortress in America without artillery. He soon came to his senses, raised the siege, gave up his command of the Granadan army, and withdrew to Jamaica to wait a new opportunity to make war on Spaniards.
The revolutionary cause was in a bad way. The loyalists of Venezuela, Ecuador, and southern New Granada had put down the insurgents in their own provinces. Bogotá was only held back by the military pressure of a few resolute republicans from declaring for the king, and the other provinces were disgusted with civil disorder and wavered in their allegiance. However, they were destined not to be given the opportunity to return peaceably to obedience on reasonable terms. Wellington's peninsular campaigns and Napoleon's fall changed the face of affairs in Spain. Ferdinand once more on the throne of his fathers, and absolute government re-established, all thought of compromising with the American rebels on the basis of autonomy or representation in the Cortes was abandoned. In April, 1815, Marshal Morillo, Spain's ablest general, arrived on the Venezuelan coast with more than ten thousand veteran regulars. Having reinforced himself among the Venezuelan loyalists, and leaving a large garrison of Spaniards in Venezuela, he proceeded to Cartagena at the head of over eight thousand troops. The defenders numbered less than four thousand, but behind the strongest fortifications in America they prepared to make a desperate resistance. So formidable were the walls that Morillo did not try to take the place by assault. His main body landed at Santa Marta and crossed the Magdalena to blockade the city from the rear, while his fleet cut off communication by sea. The besiegers suffered terribly in the pestilential swamps, but the defenders were reduced to the most horrible extremities during four months and a half. The provisions ran out; fevers decimated the people; the starving garrison ate rats and hides, sentinels fell dead at their posts; the commander drove out of the city two thousand old men, women, and children, and of this procession of spectres only a few reached the Spanish lines. Finally, the surviving soldiers escaped by boats in the midst of a storm which dispersed the Spanish squadron, and Morillo entered a deserted city where the very air was poisoned by the rotting bodies of famished people. It is calculated that six thousand persons died of hunger and disease. The Spaniards hunted down and shot the revolutionary leaders; the absolute powers of the governor were revived; and even the inquisition re-established.
While Cartagena was being besieged, a Spanish army advanced along the Venezuelan Andes to the Granadan border and climbed to the Pamplona plateau. There they defeated the local patriots, and the latter fled from the province after killing all the Spanish non-combatants on whom they could lay hands. Desperately alarmed, the congress at Bogotá made Camilo Torres dictator, and he resolutely advanced with twenty-five hundred recruits against Pamplona. The Spanish general retreated to Ocana, with the patriots following, but receiving reinforcements, turned upon Torres, and on the 22nd of February, 1816, utterly defeated him. The revolution lay helpless at Morillo's feet. The royalist forces promptly occupied the great plateau provinces of Pamplona and Socorro, as well as Antioquia. Bogotá had in fact long been disaffected to the insurgent cause and now became openly royalist. Torres resigned, and when Madrid, whom the revolutionary chiefs appointed in his place, called for volunteers only six men presented themselves. Congress dissolved, and the dictator and a few determined leaders, with a remnant of the army, fled north to Popayan. There they joined a band of local patriots under Mejia, and gave unsuccessful battle to General Samano, who had advanced from Quito. This fight of Tambo seemed the revolution's coup de grâce in New Granada, Ecuador, and Venezuela. Only on the plains of eastern Venezuela, and in the llanos on the Apuré and Casanare headwaters, did a few guerrilla bands maintain themselves. In far away Argentina, the town of Buenos Aires and the gauchos were still defiant, but elsewhere in all Spanish South America resistance to the King's generals had ceased.
Marshal Morillo fully appreciated how dangerous to Spanish domination in New Granada and Venezuela were the fierce, hard-riding, llaneros, uncatchable and unconquerable in the vast Orinoco plains. Fighting on the royal side under guerrilla chiefs they had beaten the republicans and Bolivar, but they turned insurrectionist the moment Spanish regular officers assumed command. Morillo resolved to crush the towns completely, and hoped gradually to wear out or exterminate the llaneros. In pursuance of this policy all officers above the rank of captain were denied amnesty, and shot wherever found. The same fate was reserved for those who had held high civil office during the insurrection. The Marshal came to Bogotá in person to see that his bloody orders were carried out. The city's prisons were filled with unfortunates whose wives and daughters pleaded in vain for mercy. The most prominent patriots were shot in the back as traitors and their bodies hung on gibbets. The great scholar, Caldas, the pride of Bogotá for his world-wide reputation as a scientist, suffered a not much better fate. In the capital alone one hundred and twenty-five of New Granada's brightest and best perished on the scaffold, their property was confiscated, and their families reduced to abject poverty. Because they had not actively resisted the rebellion, the entire male population were adjudged to have forfeited all civil rights, and gangs of Granadan youth were impressed into the army, or, worse still, forced to work on the public roads. Even the ladies of Bogotá were sent to country towns to remain under police surveillance with women of doubtful character.
While thus engaged in stamping out the revolutionary embers in New Granada word came to Morillo that the Venezuelan llaneros had risen against his lieutenants, and that Bolivar had landed near Valencia. Leaving a garrison of Venezuelan and Pasto royalists at Bogotá under the command of Samano, the Marshal, with four thousand Spanish troops, took the plateau road to the frontier, carrying with him some prisoners to shoot on the line. Samano's first act on assuming the government of Bogotá was to erect a gallows in the great square facing the windows of his palace, and to set up four execution benches on the public promenade. Of the victims who sat thereon with their backs to the firing squad, one of the first was the beautiful Policarpa Salabarrieta, with seven men also implicated in sending information to the llanero insurgents. She died exhorting her companions to meet their fate like men, and under the name of La Pola her memory is preserved in the songs of the Colombian people. Sixty years after her death the Colombian congress voted a pension to her surviving relatives.
THE HOME OF BOLIVAR.
Morillo never returned to New Granada. Before he arrived in Venezuela, Bolivar had temporarily retired, and the llaneros retreated to the vast solitudes in which they were unconquerable. Though the Spanish regulars won battle after battle their victories were fruitless, and Bolivar soon returned to Venezuela to be again placed at the head of the patriots and to wage unremitting warfare with cavalry from a secure base in the llanos, while he imported British mercenary infantry capable of making headway against the Spanish regulars. From 1816 to 1819 New Granada suffered hopelessly and silently the bloody despotism of the Spanish generals, while the tide of war rolled to and fro in Venezuela. In the early part of the latter year Samano sent a small expedition down the steep Cordillera slope against the guerrillas in the Casanare plains north-east of Bogotá. This gave Bolivar a great strategical idea. He knew that the tableland of New Granada had been denuded of troops; but it was useless to try an attack from the direction of the provinces south of Maracaibo Bay because this well-travelled route and its populous towns were in secure possession of the enemy. Where Spaniards could go he could follow—so he reasoned—and determined to assault Bogotá directly from the Orinoco plains, thus striking the centre of the Spanish line.
With a mixed army of British mercenaries and hardy Venezuelans the Liberator mounted the difficult pass which leads from Casanare up to Tunja. Samano had only three thousand troops and these he sent under the command of General Barreiro to meet Bolivar. Though the patriots were somewhat inferior in numbers and arrived on the plateau fatigued, starving, and without horses, Barreiro, not knowing their real numbers, hesitated about attacking. Bolivar was given time to rest and remount his men, and then took a vigorous offensive. His rapid movements confused the Spanish commander, and the latter allowed the patriot army to get between him and Bogotá. Thus cut off from his base, Barreiro made a desperate dash to reach the capital, but ran against the patriots posted directly across his path at Boyacá, on the 7th of August, 1819. The loyalists attacked at a disadvantage and without hope. After losing a hundred men they fled in disorder and the whole army dispersed or was captured. The way to Bogotá lay open, and Samano had no forces to defend the city. Within three days Bolivar had traversed the hundred miles from the battlefield, and Samano fled in such precipitous haste that he left behind the government archives and even the money in the treasury. A month later the whole of New Granada, except the stubbornly loyalist Pasto and the fortress of Cartagena, was free. Bolivar had himself made president and military dictator, naming Santander vice-president, and giving each province two governors, one military and the other civil, responsible directly to Bogotá. The municipal governments were preserved, and the Spanish system of taxation continued, but patriot republicans displaced loyalists in all the offices.
Bolivar soon returned to his Venezuelan headquarters on the Orinoco to fight Morillo and organise the grand republic he had dreamed of so many years. Though all of Venezuela except the Orinoco valley, all of Ecuador, and the sea-ports and southern provinces of New Granada still remained in the hands of superior Spanish armies, and although the Creole ruling class had already proved strongly prejudiced in favour of local autonomy and the tearing down of aristocratic forms, his imagination vaulted all obstacles and he planned the new state down to its minutest details. His idea was a centralised system with himself at its head as life president, backed by a hereditary senate, and ruling the three grand divisions of his empire through docile vice-presidents. But his military power and prestige were insufficient to overcome the opposition of jealous generals and ambitious lawyers. He spent the year of 1820 in futile intrigues among the politicians, and in unsuccessful campaigns against the Spaniards in Venezuela, while the patriots trembled at the news that a great army was assembling at Cadiz which would surely sweep them out of existence. A liberal revolution in Spain came opportunely to interrupt military operations.
Bolivar was obliged to compromise with the advocates of federalism and democracy. A congress representing the Granadan and Venezuelan provinces then in the hands of the patriots assembled at Cucutá early in 1821. Composed of ambitious civilians it was opposed to centralisation or military rule, and in spite of the Liberator's protests adopted a compromise Constitution. Though Bolivar was conceded the title of president, he was required to give up his civil authority whenever he took command of the army, and this meant an abolishment of the dictatorship. The idea of a life presidency or a hereditary senate was abandoned, and the only part of his system which Bolivar managed to retain was the subordination of the provinces to the central government. The Liberator now devoted himself to the direction of the war, leaving that long-headed schemer, Santander, in power at Bogotá as vice-president. The winning of the battle of Carabobo in Venezuela in June, 1821, and the surrender of Cartagena in September, made necessary the withdrawal of the Spanish troops from the Isthmus. Panama immediately declared itself independent, in November, 1821, and announced its intention of joining the great confederation of Colombia, then composed of the provinces of Venezuela, and New Granada, and later of those of Ecuador.
Pasto alone remained in the hands of the Spaniards. Bolivar determined to expel them from this province, and also from Quito and Guayaquil, while visions of conquests in Peru and Bolivia, and of returning to his dazzled countrymen in Colombia crowned with laurels gathered on southern battle-fields, floated through his mind. Congress gladly gave him leave of absence and Santander promised supplies of money and soldiers. In 1822 he advanced against Pasto, sending his able lieutenant, Sucré, around by sea to Guayaquil to take Quito from the south. Gathering three thousand men at Popayan he marched into Pasto and on the 7th of April came upon the royal army at Bambona. A bloody battle followed and Bolivar by inciting his men to reckless charges remained master of the field. However, he lost three times as many men as the royalists; the latter retired in good order, and the Liberator, after encamping eight days on the plateau, surrounded by a hostile population, hampered by the difficulties of the mountain paths, with a strong enemy in front, was compelled to retreat on Popayan, leaving his sick and wounded. He remained inactive until the glorious news of Sucré's overwhelming victory at Pichincha arrived. The loyalists in Pasto were now completely isolated. The Spanish commander made terms with Bolivar and the indomitable mountaineers were induced to submit on the promise that they should be allowed to retain their local laws and customs.
PANAMA FROM THE BAY.
