On the resumption of hostilities, General Torres, who had succeeded Valdez in command, was forced by Garcia to shut himself up in Popayán. He afterwards marched with 1800 men upon Pasto, but suffered such heavy losses by sickness and desertion, that he was compelled to retreat, and in August he abandoned Popayán.
The Royalists of Patia and Pasto, aided from Quito, might have prolonged the war indefinitely but that the operations of San Martin and Cochrane threw their base open to attack, and the revolution of Guayaquil cut off all communication between Quito and the Pacific. Bolívar saw this, and as Quito was not included in the armistice of Trujillo, determined to attack from the South as well as from the North, and at the same time open for himself a road to the Pacific. Looking about for an officer to whom he could entrust the undertaking, he chose General Sucre, who was at that time Minister of War of the Republic of Columbia.
Sucre was a native of Cumaná, had received a scientific education, and had served from his early youth in all the campaigns of the revolution of Venezuela, under Miranda, Piar, and Bolívar. Bolívar said of him:—
“Sucre has the best organized head in all Columbia.”
San Martin, who never met him, wrote of him in after years, that he was one of the most noteworthy men produced by the Republic of Columbia, and of greater military skill than even Bolívar himself.
The mission confided to Sucre was both political and military. He was to aid the new State of Guayaquil against the Royalists, and was to induce her to join the Republic of Columbia. At Popayán he collected a thousand of the dispersed troops, and reached Guayaquil by sea in May, 1821. He found that the majority of the people were in favour of union with Peru, and that they had already suffered defeat in their first brush with the Royalists.
At this juncture the flotilla and a battalion of native troops revolted in the name of the King. Sucre put down the movement, and thus became master of the situation, and commander-in-chief of all the forces.
At the head of a combined army, Sucre then marched against the Royalists, who under Aymerich were descending the mountain slopes from Quito, in two separate columns. One of these columns he totally defeated at Yahuachí on the 19th August, and compelled the other, which was led by Aymerich himself, to return to Quito with heavy loss. He then ascended the slopes of Chimborazo and occupied the plateau of Ambato, but was here attacked by Colonel Gonzalez with very superior forces, and was completely defeated, with a loss of 300 killed and 640 prisoners. He himself was wounded, and returned to his former position with a remnant of his force. Here he was fortunately reinforced by a battalion of 500 Columbian infantry, and as Aymerich did not follow up the victory, held his ground, till on the 20th November he arranged an armistice of ninety days.
At this time the Royalists, whose total force of regular troops amounted to 3,000 men, in the Provinces of Cuenca, Quito, and Pasto, received a reinforcement of 800 men, under General Murgeón, who had been appointed Viceroy of New Granada on the death of Sámano. Murgeón had arrived from Europe at Puerto Cabello with a smaller force, which being increased by La Torre, he led across the Isthmus to Panamá, whence he went by sea to Atacames, and from there marched for sixty miles through a dense forest and then over the Cordillera to Quito, where he arrived on the 24th December, 1821, and took the command.
When New Granada was secure, Bolívar wrote to O’Higgins that:—“The Army of Columbia was about to march on Quito with orders to co-operate with the Argentine-Chileno Army in their operations against Lima,” but after that, affairs in the North distracted his attention. After the fall of Cartagena, he wrote to San Martin, proposing to take 4,000 men across the isthmus, and by sea to Peru, to aid him in crushing the Royalists in the centre of their power, leaving them in their positions on the equatorial Andes till afterwards. But the defeat suffered by Sucre, and the arrival of Murgeón, determined him first of all to prosecute the war in the south of Columbia.