A Biography of Henry Clay, the Senator from Kentucky / Containing Also, a Complete Report of All His Speeches; Selections From His Private Correspondence; Eulogies in the Senate and House; and a Poem, by George D. Prentice, Esq.

by Unknown

If Spanish America be entitled to success from the justness of her cause, we have no less reason to wish that success, from the horrible character which the royal arms have given to the war. More atrocities, than those which have been perpetrated during its existence, are not to be found, even in the annals of Spain herself. And history, reserving some of her blackest pages for the name of Morillo, is prepared to place him by the side of his great prototype, the infamous desolater of the Netherlands. He who has looked into the history of the conduct of this war, is constantly shocked at the revolting scenes which it portrays; at the refusal, on the part of the commanders of the royal forces, to treat, on any terms, with the other side; at the denial of quarters; at the butchery, in cold blood, of prisoners; at the violation of flags, in some cases, after being received with religions ceremonies; at the instigation of slaves to rise against their owners; and at acts of wanton and useless barbarity. Neither the weakness of the other sex, nor the imbecility of old age, nor the innocence of infants, nor the reverence due to the sarcedotal character, can stay the arm of royal vengeance. On this subject, I beg leave to trouble the committee, with reading a few passages from a most authentic document, the manifesto of the congress of the United Provinces of Rio del la Plata, published in October last. This is a paper of the highest authority; it is an appeal to the world; it asserts facts of notoriety in the face of the whole world. It is not to be credited, that the congress would come forward with a statement which was not true, when the means, if it were false, of exposing their fabrications, must be so abundant, and so easy to command. It is a document, in short, that stands upon the same footing of authority with our own papers, promulgated during the revolution by our congress. I will add, that many of the facts which it affirms, are corroborated by most respectable historical testimony, which is in my own possession.

‘Memory shudders at the recital of the horrors that were committed by Goyeneche in Cochabamba. Would to heaven it were possible to blot from remembrance the name of that ungrateful and blood-thirsty American; who, on the day of his entry, ordered the virtuous governor and intendant, Antesana, to be shot; who, beholding from the balcony of his house that infamous murder, cried out with a ferocious voice to the soldiers, that they must not fire at the head, because he wanted it to be affixed to a pole; and who, after the head was taken off, ordered the cold corpse to be dragged through the streets; and, by a barbarous decree, placed the lives and fortunes of the citizens at the mercy of his unbridled soldiery, leaving them to exercise their licentious and brutal sway during several days! But those blind and cruelly capricious men (the Spaniards) rejected the mediation of England, and despatched rigorous orders to all the generals, to aggravate the war, and to punish us with more severity. The scaffolds were every where multiplied, and invention was racked to devise means for spreading murder, distress, and consternation.

‘Thenceforth they made all possible efforts to spread division amongst us, to incite us to mutual extermination; they have slandered us with the most atrocious calumnies; accusing us of plotting the destruction of our holy religion, the abolition of all morality, and of introducing licentiousness of manners. They wage a religious waragainst us, contriving a thousand artifices to disturb and alarm the consciences of the people, making the Spanish bishops issue decrees of ecclesiastical condemnation, public excommunications, and disseminating, through the medium of some ignorant confessor, fanatical doctrines in the tribunal of penitence. By means of these religious discords, they have divided families against themselves; they have caused disaffection between parents and children; they have dissolved the tender ties which unite man and wife; they have spread rancor and implacable hatred between brothers most endeared, and they have presumed to throw all nature into discord.

‘They have adopted the system of murdering men indiscriminately, to diminish our numbers; and, on their entry into towns, they have swept off all, even the market people, leading them to the open squares, and there shooting them one by one. The cities of Chuquisaca and Cochabamba have more than once been the theatres of these horrid slaughters.

‘They have intermixed with their troops soldiers of ours, whom they had taken prisoners, carrying away the officers in chains, to garrisons where it is impossible to preserve health for a year; they have left others to die in their prisons, of hunger and misery, and others they have forced to hard labor on the public works. They have exultingly put to death our bearers of flags of truce, and have been guilty of the blackest atrocities to our chiefs, after they had surrendered, as well as to other principal characters, in disregard of the humanity with which we treated prisoners; as a proof of it, witness the deputy Mutes of Potosi, the captain-general Pumacagua, general Augulo, and his brother commandant Munecas, and other partisan chiefs, who were shot in cold blood after having been prisoners for several days.

‘They took a brutal pleasure in cropping the ears of the natives of the town of Ville-Grande, and sending a basket full of them as presents to the head-quarters. They afterwards burnt that town, and set fire to thirty other populous towns of Peru, and, worse than the worst of savages, shutting the inhabitants up in the houses before setting them on fire, that they might be burnt alive.

‘They have not only been cruel and unsparing in their mode of murder, but they have been void of all morality and public decency, causing aged ecclesiastics and women to be lashed to a gun, and publicly flogged, with the abomination of first having them stripped, and their nakedness exposed to shame, in the presence of their troops.

‘They established an inquisitorial system in all these punishments; they have seized on peaceable inhabitants, and transported them across the sea, to be judged for suspected crimes, and they have put a great number of citizens to death every where, without accusation or the form of a trial.

‘They have invented a crime of unexampled horror, in poisoning our water and provisions, when they were conquered by general Pineto at Lapaz; and, in return for the kindness with which we treated them, after they had surrendered at discretion, they had the barbarity to blow up the head-quarters, under which they had constructed a mine, and prepared a train, beforehand.

‘He has branded us with the stigma of rebels, the moment he returned to Madrid; he refused to listen to our complaints, or to receive our supplications; and, as an act of extreme favor, he offered us pardon. He confirmed the viceroys, governors, and generals whom he found actually glutted with carnage. He declared us guilty of a high misdemeanor, for having dared to frame a constitution for our own government, free from the control of a deified, absolute, and tyrannical power, under which we had groaned three centuries; a measure that could be offensive only to a prince, an enemy to justice and beneficence, and consequently unworthy to rule over us.