Bolivar's British Volunteers

Here's another blog. I think this one is my favourite...

In the fifth of a series of blogs to promote the release of Conquer or Die!, his forthcoming book on the British volunteers who helped Simón Bolívar liberate Gran Colombia, Ben Hughes discusses the relative merits of ‘The South American George Washington’ and his rather more famous Virginian peer.  

            Although both Bolívar and Washington are remembered for their military successes, their strategic skills were actually rather flawed. The latter’s early encounters with the redcoats ended in defeat and the Liberator’s insistence on pursuing the royalists into their mountain stronghold in 1818 proved equally disastrous. With General Páez’s cavalry unable to operate over the broken ground, the disciplined Spanish infantry overran Bolívar’s Indian, black and mulatto conscripts, Creole elite and British volunteers. Close to three thousand were killed and the survivors were scattered. Washington’s decision to defend New York in 1776 also proved short-sighted. First, General Clinton outflanked the American positions on the Brooklyn Heights with a daring night time march, then the redcoats and Hessians outfought the militias in the struggle that followed. What made both Washington and Bolívar great was not their military acumen, but rather their indefatigable ability to rise from defeat to rebuild their shattered armies time and again. Just as Washington endured the winter at Valley Forge to defeat what were arguably the most powerful armed forces in the eighteenth century world, Bolívar’s troops would also eventually secure victory. Washington’s success at Yorktown was mirrored by the Liberator’s victories at Vargas and Boyacá. Despite its ominous beginnings, Bolívar’s campaign of 1819, which saw him traverse the Andes to fall upon the Spaniards’ exposed rear, would prove to be one of the most outstanding, and at the same time little known, military achievements of the age.

            The differences between the two men are equally revealing. Whilst Cornwallis’ surrender in 1781 sounded the death knell for British ambitions in North America, 1819 was merely the turning point for the Liberator. His campaigns against the royalists, begun in 1813, would stretch on for another six years and would eventually see him liberate six countries. Washington, on the other hand, fought the British and North American loyalists for a little over half that time and the conflict never stretched beyond the borders of his homeland. Furthermore, whilst Bolivar was an intensely political animal, Washington was never particularly interested in events away from the battlefield. When not employed fighting Indian and French raiders on the Virginian frontier, as a slave master and landowner, he was at his happiest overseeing affairs on his farm and in 1775 had to be persuaded to take up the hatchet against the British regulars whose tenacity and discipline he had so admired during the Seven Years’ War. Bolivar also came from a privileged background, but tragedy soon persuaded him to strive for more than the dream of a rural idyll. After his Spanish wife, the one true love of a philandering life, died of yellow fever when he was just 19 years old, he immersed himself in the teachings of the enlightenment and committed to his country’s fight for independence, a struggle that consumed him, leaving him a shell of a man consumed by tuberculosis. Where Washington was a conservative figurehead manipulated by politicians, Bolivar was the driving force behind the South American revolution and his policies were remarkably forward thinking for the time. A fervent abolitionist, he dreamed of uniting the colonies of New Granada, Venezuela and Ecuador to create his vision of Gran Colombia, a South American republic that would be powerful enough to hold its own on the world stage.

            Ultimately, however, Bolívar was a tragic figure and Gran Colombia a step too far. Whilst Washington passed away peacefully aged 67 on his Virginian farm, his last words “’tis well” and fêted by friends and foes alike, the Liberator died on his way into an ignominious exile three years before his fortieth birthday, with the short-lived republic he had formed already split into its three constituent parts. Washington’s legacy was to bequeath the United States of America to the world, whilst in Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, political instability and internecine conflict have reverberated throughout the ages and still hamper development today.