Meantime the dual dictatorship brought forth its natural fruit. The victories of the West were sterile without the concurrence of the army of the East. Mariño refused to combine operations with Bolívar until he was recognised as the supreme ruler of the territory he possessed. The Liberator modestly entreated him to march upon the plains, where Boves and Yañez were recruiting. Far from doing this, though such action was necessary to his own security, he even recalled his flotilla from Puerto Cabello, but Piar listened to the appeals of Bolívar, and continued the blockade. The result was that Bolívar, being unable to attend to the siege of Puerto Cabello and to the war upon the plains at the same time, Boves and Yañez were speedily in a position to assume the offensive. Boves, more especially, with that wonderful energy which hesitated at no means, however terrible they might be, to the end before him, again took the field, two months after his defeat by Campo Elias.
On the 1st November he summoned all able-bodied men to join him, proclaimed war to the knife against the Patriots, decreed that their goods should be distributed among his troops, and, finally, liberated all slaves who would enlist under the banners of the King. The Llaneros, irritated by the massacre of Calabozo, and eager for plunder, flocked in masses to his standard. From Guayana came 100 infantry and one gun. By the middle of December he had 3,000 cavalry, the blades of whose lances were forged from the spikes torn from the railings of windows.
With this horde he descended to the lower plains. On the 14th December he routed a division of 1,000 men at San Marcos, and occupied Calabozo, slaughtering without mercy, and enriching his troops with booty. He then overran the whole plain lying between the windward coast range and the Gulf of Paria. For further operations he needed infantry, and set to work to make some. At the same time Yañez, with some help from Guayana, organized a force of 2,000 men on the Apure, and captured the city of Barinas, while Cajigal and Ceballos raised another army on the leeward coast.
Bolívar was reduced to Caracas and the neighbouring valleys, with a feeble reserve in Valencia, and was constantly harassed by Royalist guerillas. Urdaneta, who had marched on Coro, was forced to return to his assistance.
Mariño, with 3,500 men distributed along the coasts of Barcelona and Cumaná, and in the adjacent valleys, did nothing. All the rest of Venezuela was occupied by Royalists; the country people were everywhere in favour of the reaction, and the Patriots were forced to seek refuge in the cities. The Patriot armies were entirely without guides, no one would give them any information. Despatches to the various commanders could only be forwarded from head-quarters under strong escort. At times only four men out of an escort reached their destination. Public opinion had returned to the state in which it was left by the earthquake of 1812.
Columbian historians attribute this revulsion of feeling to Bolívar’s decree of extermination, and to the excesses authorized by him. Bolívar was to fall as Miranda had fallen before him, but from different causes. Ever the logic of Destiny!
CHAPTER XXXIX.
THE SECOND FALL OF VENEZUELA.
1814.
A DICTATORSHIP was a necessity of the time, but the powers of a Dictator to be efficient must be united in one person. Bolívar shared his power with Mariño, the alleged rights of both rested upon force only. To put an end to this anomaly Bolívar determined upon an appeal to public opinion. It was impossible to summon a Congress, he therefore convened an Assembly composed of the civil corporations and of the heads of families of the city of Caracas.
Now was disclosed another phase of his complex character; never in any public man were seen greater contradictions between word and deed. A prey to insatiable ambition he was eager for uncontrolled power, but repudiated it in theory. In South America he was the inventor of the system of resignations, which has had great vogue since his time. He had supreme power in his hands, and resigned it, protesting that he would never again accept it, but took it back on conditions imposed by himself. Throughout his career, he ever invoked the high authority of Congresses as the representatives of public opinion; sometimes he gave way to them, more frequently he imposed his will upon them; but he always sought their sanction for his acts, and so compelled them to share responsibility with him.
To the Assembly he now convened at Caracas, to which by a convenient fiction he attributed representative authority, he gave an account of his administration, and into its hands he abdicated the power he had bestowed upon himself, only to receive it back again intact. He made three speeches; in the first he abdicated the Dictatorship, and pronounced a warm eulogium upon his own deeds; in the second, he gave a biographical sketch of his own life, and showed from it that it was impossible for him to continue in the exercise of unlimited power; in the third, he again accepted the Dictatorship, which was bestowed upon him without conditions by the acclamations of the Assembly.