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.