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.