Revolutions - 5.21- The Third Sister

Episode Date: December 4, 2016

In 1822, Antonio Jose Sucre and Simon Bolivar liberated Quito and made Gran Colombia whole.    Sponsor Link: Harrys Razors

Hello and welcome to revolutions. Episode 5.21, the third sister. Okay, so first of all, the fundraiser is now closed. It went great, and I cannot thank you guys all enough for the support. The show will go on because I think we can all agree that the show must go on. So if you've ordered a shirt or print, the emails with tracking numbers should start showing up in your inbox any day now. But I do want to say that though merchandise sales are now closed, the five new appendices for the history of Rome will remain available at Revolutionspodcast.com indefinitely. There's no reason to take them down. I have also elected to throw back up the five-sided cross, which is a story I wrote a while back for the three-day novel contest and then recorded as an audiobook and sold during the first fundraiser. It's a half-serious, half-satirical detective story about a mysterious macuffin with magical powers, three and a hours of entertainment for only 10 bucks. So you can still go to Revolutionspodcastfundraiser.com

and get the history of Rome appendices or the five-sided cross, while all the physical merchandise should be going in the mail any day now. Okay, so getting back to it, we have straight a bit from Belivar the past few episodes, abandoning him after the victory at Carobobo so we could go down and snag Jose de Saint-Martine and bring him up to Lima. So when last we left, our Intrepid Liberator, it was October of 1821, and he had just accepted the presidency of the new Republic of Columbia. But if you will recall, though, he didn't really want the job, and he left day-to-day administration of Colombia to Vice President Santander, who really did want the job. As much as Believer avoided civilian politics to keep his focus on military affairs,

Santander embraced civilian politics and was happy to never have to fire a shot in anger ever again. The Liberator and the man of laws were in that respect the perfect team, Belivar running the army, Santander running the government. But their diverging responsibilities would soon lead to friction between the two men, as Belivar would grow impatient with Santander's obsession with legal formalities, while Santander would get exasperated with Belivar's imperious demands. As soon as the two men formally took up their offices in October 1821, this friction began to reveal itself. Belivar ordered Santander to dig up 5,000 men and appropriate arms and supplies and have them ready to march south out of Bogota as soon as possible. Now, Santander did his best to accommodate the Liberator, but this was the beginning of a long-running feud between them,

with Belivar constantly demanding more Colombian men, more Colombian arms, and more Colombian money, even as he himself marched further and further away from Colombia. But for the moment, Belivar's objective was still to make Columbia a whole, to go evict the last remaining royalists from Colombian-claimed territory in some heroic battle, finding that third sister, joined Boyakha and Karabobo, to mark the liberation of Quito. So, Santander supplied Belivar with an army. So to set the stage here, remember from our last few episodes that after Lord Cochran's naval victory secured the high seas for the Patriots in 1820, The critical port city of Guayaquil declared independence at the end of the year. As soon as he heard the news, Belivar dispatched a thousand Colombian troops under Brigadier General Sucre to ensure that Guayaquil remained free from Spanish rule, but more importantly, that it was eventually integrated into Grand Columbia.

So as Belivar gathered his troops in Bogota at the end of 1821 to march off and liberate Quito, his plan was to lead his army to the coast, ferry them all down to Guayaquil by sea, link up with Sukre, and then together they would all push up into the mountains together to capture Quito. And by early December, Belivar had gathered about 4,000 men, not the 5,000 he had asked for, but it was deemed good enough. And on December the 13th, 1821, Belivar marched out of Bogota. But his grand plan was thwarted by some bad intelligence. A report came up from the coast that Spanish ships were landing more troops and controlled the entire coastline.

But this was not true at all. Somebody just saw a single ship landing a small party of about 800 reinforcements and then wildly exaggerated what was going on. The false intelligence forced Belivir to alter his plans. Abandoning the sea route, he would now march the rough mountain road southwest all the way to Quito, while sending orders down to Sukre and Guayaquil to come up and hit them from the other side. The only problem, though, was that royalist forces had pretty well bottled Sukhre up in Guayaquil, and he couldn't get out. And given the communications lag time between the two forces, neither Sukhre nor Belivar really knew what the other was doing. And it was more by luck than anything else that they managed the two front offensive on Quito.

The change in plans meant yet another feat of patriotic endurance, as the long march through the mountainous roads to Quito took months and took its toll. It costs Belivar men to death, injury, and desertion practically every day. But after slogging unhappily along for a few weeks, Belivar finally got some good news. Approaching Popayan, the first major royalist-held city on the road to Quito, Belivar was delighted to be presented with a note from the commander of the city's garrison. Not only was he ready to surrender, but he was willing to defect. So this is great news. Not only did Belivar not have to fight to secure Papayon, but he got a whole bunch more

troops to boot. Suspecting that this was evidence of collapsing royalist morale and that that collapse of morale might be exploitable, Belivar hatched what he thought was a pretty clever plan. As he marched towards Posto, the next major city on the road to Quito, he wrote back to Vice President Santander, requesting that he composed fake news articles reporting that the Spanish were giving up hope on holding South America and then plant them in Bogota newspapers. Belivar also requested fake-of-a-office. official communiques that would show the Spanish requesting safe passage for negotiators,

and then warm letters of greeting from both Vice President Santander and General Paz back in Venezuela. Now, given the recent liberal revolution back in Spain, the idea that the Spanish might have dispatched envoys to negotiate surrender was not at all implausible. And so when Belivar reached the gates of Posto, he had this stack of evidence supporting this fake story. But unfortunately, he found the royalist in Posto far more high. to the Republic and not buying this propaganda for a second. Maybe it was true, maybe it wasn't, but they were not going to believe it until they heard it straight from the lion's mouth. So his ruse failed. Belivar tried to keep marching rather than get bogged down besieging Posto,

but as he moved, 1,200 royalists from the Posto garrison marched out to block his path. In rough volcanic country riddled with steep cliffs, the two armies ran into each other at Bombana in late April, where the royalist successfully took strategic high ground and waited for Belivar to try to march through. Giving himself back to his old instincts, Belivar decided that he could take the outnumbered royalists on Easter Sunday 1822, and he ordered his men on a full frontal assault up the steep cliffs to try to capture the high ground the royalist held. The results were predictably gruesome, as Belivar's forces took heavy casualties. But one intrepid patriot officer led a unit on a daring climb up a ship. sheer cliff face to get the drop on the royalists. But even with this success, the fighting went on

until night fell, and under the cover of both darkness and fog, the Posto Royalists elected to withdraw from their position rather than keep fighting. So technically, the Battle of Bombanaugh was a victory for Belivar, but it was a Pyrrhic one, to be sure, costing him 600 dead and wounded to say nothing of the desertions that followed in the immediate aftermath. So despite claiming it as a victory, The Battle of Bombana was obviously not the third sister Belivar was hunting for. And in fact, much to his later chagrin, it would turn out that he would not be the one to find that elusive third sister. And in fact, in the story of the liberation of Quito, the role of the Liberator was to act as mere distraction, a distraction that allowed Antonio Jose Sukre to break out of Guayaquil and attack Quito from the other direction.

And since it would be Sukre and not Belivar who would find the third sister on the slopes of the Pichinian, a volcano. Let's now finally bring Sukre onto the board. Antonio Jose de Sucre was born in the eastern Venezuelan city of Kumanah in 1795. Descended from old Flemish nobility that had come over to Spanish America a century earlier, Sukre's grandfather has served as governor of both Cuba and Caracas, and the Suu Kare's father was the governor of Kumanah province at the time of his birth. So though little on time, was not Caracas aristocracy. He was born and raised in Kumanah. He was still the son of the elite Crioia ruling class. As would have been standard for a boy of his position, he was enrolled in a military

cadet academy as a young teenager. But this was right as the world was being turned upside down. I mean, Sukhre was only 12 when the abdications of Bayon hit. So young Sukhre remained enrolled in the army through the next few turbulent years, as the Caracas junta took over in 1810, and then Venezuela declared independence in 1811. Stationed in the east as a junior officer, though, Sukre does not appear to have seen much military service during the campaigns that have been led by Francisco de Miranda, and after the fall of the First Republic in 1812, Sukre appears to have just been amnestied by the victorious Monteverde. Now, from here I lose track of him a little bit, because though we know that Sukre got papers that would allow him to depart for British Trinidad,

it's not clear that he ever actually left. If he did go to Trinidad, that means that he linked up with Santiago Morino there and probably joined the 45 who came back over into Venezuela to restart the war. But more probably, Sukre stayed in eastern Venezuela and simply joined Marino's growing army when it arrived in early 1813. Whichever it was, though, he joined Marino's army as it liberated the eastern provinces through 1813, this is as Belivar is coming through on the admirable campaign, all of which culminated in the founding of the Second Republic. But after the founding of the Second Republic,

Sukre's life took a tragic turn. As we saw in episode 5.11, when the legions of hell pushed the Republicans east, Sukhre's homeland became a bloody war zone, as the war to the death here was still in full swing. No one was spared, not civilian, not soldier, and most of Suu Kare's brothers and sisters and extended family were killed through the bloody year of 1814 as the Second Republic collapsed. Sucre himself only survived because he followed General Bermudez to the relative safety of Margarita Island. But that turned out to only be a temporary safe haven because Pablo Morillo's Grand Armada came roaring over the horizon in April 1815, and the last Venezuelan Republican holdouts on Margarita Island were forced to flee to Cartagena.

This means that Sukre was present for Pablo Murillo's subsequent siege of Cartagena, and along with Bermudez and the wily Scottish General Gregor McGregor, Sukre was among those who staged the final breakout from Cardahena in December 1815, and was among the Patriot refugees who then sailed for the Republic of Haiti. In Haiti, Sukre reunited with Marigno, and was promoted to Colonel and became Marino's chief of staff. But this was also the first time Sukreouriya. encountered Belivar, at least in close quarters, and though I do not know what they made of each other

at first glance. By now, Sukre had developed loyalties to a greater revolutionary cause that extended beyond the scope of Caudillo-style local power pursued by his longtime superior Marino. They all then sailed to Venezuela together, but as I mentioned in episode 5.14, when Marino started ignoring the orders of El Hefe Supremo Belivar, Sucra was in the party of 30 officers who abandoned Marino and rode off to join Belivar, signaling that his attachment to the revolutionary cause was greater than his attachment to any particular man. Made commander of the Lower Orinoco River, he was then elevated to general in 1819 by Vice President Seya, who was looking for men more committed to the greater revolutionary cause than any personal attachments.

This is when Scea is trying and failing to exert authority over Marino and Aris Mendi, and he promoted the supremely capable Sucre to general, even though he was still just 25 years old. So Sucre was not present for Belivar's march up into the Andes or the Battle of Boyakha, but he did meet Belivar as the Liberator came rushing back to Angostura to deal with the coup that had been orchestrated by Marino and Aris Mendi. This was all in episode 5.17. A sucre had already earned Belivar's affection when he abandoned Marino, but this is the point where it appears that he really started viewing Sukre as a potential heir apparent. Though young, Sukre showed wisdom beyond his years.

His only fault really was a habit of micromanagement. He wanted to write every dispatch and review every supply shipment. But in the rag-tag Venezuelan armies that often seemed slapped together with nothing more than bravado, a little micromanagement was not exactly a bad thing. So Sucre attached himself to Belivar and earned the Liberator's trust to the point that Sucre was one of the principal go-betweens during the final negotiations with General Pablo Morillo in 1820, and so he was there when they all got drunk and dropped the big rock down on the side of the road. And so when news subsequently came in January of 1821 that Guayaquil had revolted,

there was no man Belivar trusted more to head down to the city and defend it both from Spanish reconquest and more importantly to preserve it for future annexation into Colombia. There were very few men that Belivar could trust out of sight, and Sukre proved to be the best of them, and Belivar would later say that if God let you choose a family, that he would have chosen Suu Kri as his son. After finally arriving in Guayaquil in the spring of 1821, Sucrii and and his thousand troops proved to be a welcome addition to the cause. Mostly.

The all-important port city was technically within the boundaries of the vice-royalty of New Granada, had been for nearly a century, and was thus slated for future integration into Grand Columbia. But before that, they had been a part of the vice-royalty of Peru, and Guayaquil's daily economic and social ties clearly faced south down the coast to Lima. Everyone passing through the harbor at Guayaquil was either going to or coming from Lima. So the population there was split about how they wanted to handle their independence. Most wanted to join themselves to Peru as soon as San Martín liberated it,

while a few others did prefer Colombia, possibly suspecting that with their capital located in hard-to-reach Bogota rather than right down the coast in Lima, that their local autonomy might actually be enhanced. So Suu Kare and his men were welcome. A thousand men is nothing you say no to, but the pro-Peruvian faction kept their eye on the young Colombian general. Suu Kroix made an initial attempt to start clearing out the road to Quito in the summer of 1821, but he ran into such heavy resistance that he was forced to fall back to the safety of Guayaquil. In fact, in Suu Kray's estimation, without massive reinforcements, he was all but trapped in the city, and he wrote dispatches north to Belivar and south to San Martín to tell both great generals just that.

By this point, though, San Martin had entered Lima and declared Peruvian independence, and after receiving Sucre's request for reinforcements, he ordered 1,200 men to march north. Now, this was both a show of patriotic solidarity, but it also offered San Martín a chance to start staking his own claims to the region. With these men on the way, Sucre then marched out of Guayaquil again in January of 1822, taking a circuitous route to Quito. Rather than heading northeast straight at the capital, he instead headed due south, marching along the coast before turning and swinging up to the highland town of Sautagudo. There, he linked up with the 1,200 Peruvian reinforcements,

led by the highly capable young colonel, Andres de Santa Cruz. Now, Santa Cruz is a minor player in our story, but just so you know, he goes on to be president of liberated Bolivia, from 1829 to 1839, in the middle of which he also became the supreme protector of the Peru Bolivian Confederation from 1836 to 1839. That was during the war of the Confederation that was fought against Chile and Argentina, because FYI, it's not like Spanish-American independence is going to magically solve all the factional struggles in South America. Anyway, Sukre and Santa Cruz prepared to march their combined army now of about 3,000 men, threw the mountains up to Quito from the deep south rather than coming up at them from the

coast. As winter gave way to spring, Sukre and his army slowly advanced on Quito, forcing the all but nominal garrisons he encountered along the way to fall back at the first sight of this Patriot army. And none of these garrisons could be reinforced, because at the same time Belivar's army is marching down from Colombia and was predictably soaking up a lot of royalist attention. By late April 1822, Sucre had captured Rio Bamba and was making his final approach on Kito. The royalist leadership in the capital finally realized that Sucre posed a very real threat, and they heavily fortified the main roads leading into town. These fortifications were strong enough that Sucre determined a direct attack on the city would be suicidal. So rather than take the

main roads, Sucre led his men up around through the treacherous volcanic peaks around the to the city to flank Quito's defenses. It wasn't until mid-May that the royalist realized Sukre was marching around them through the mountains. They tried to regroup, but with one final push up and over all 10,000 icy feet of the great volcano at Pichinichia, Sukre's army came pouring down out of the mountains on the morning of May 25, 1822. Sucrii's army was met by a royalist defense force about 2,000 strong, and the two sides were instantly locked in an intense battle where neither side seemed to be able to get the upper hand, and they were both quite literally trying to get the upper hand, using the steep terrain to constantly take higher ground than the enemy

currently held. Eventually, after hours of fighting, though, the royalists lines collapsed back towards Quito, just ahead of a formal order from their commanders to retreat. The Patriot forces pursued these retreating royalists all the way to the gates of the city. But Sucre ordered his men to not enter the city. He didn't want them charging in and plundering everything in sight because they were here to liberate Kito, not sack it. The next day, Sucre demanded the garrison commander of Kito surrender, and now believing that it really was hopeless to hold out, the commander surrendered. And so Sucre was able to lead his men peacefully into Kito. A savvy and a savvy and generous man of honor, Sucre went out of his way to keep his troops on a tight leash so that their

arrival would be celebrated by the residents and not resented. He also followed through with the terms of surrender he had worked out. After placing the surviving royalist troops in custody, any Spanish soldier who wanted to depart the country was free to depart with full military honors. Although if anybody wanted to stay and defect to the patriot cause of liberty and justice, etc., etc., they were free to do so. Most of the soldiers are elected to quit the country and go home, but more than a few walked across the lines. The fall of Quito was the great big domino the Patriots hoped that it would be. The remaining royalists held cities in the region threw up their arms and said, forget it,

we're done as soon as they heard the capital had been taken. Even the staunch holdouts in Pasta refused to just go down with the ship, and with Belivar still lingering in the vicinity, they signaled their surrender. Now, as was usually the case with Belivar. He was thrilled and dismayed by all this. Thrilled for all the obvious reasons, you know, total victory and all that. But he was a little ticked off that his victory at Bon Banah was going to be overshadowed by Sukre's victory at Pichinichia, that the glory for finding the third sister would go to Sukre and not Belivar.

And he wrote a few dispatches back to Santander trying to position the official story of the campaign as Belivar being the victorious general. But to be fair to Belivar, he would soon get over his disappointment. I mean, it was Sukre, after all, who won the battle. And if he was going to share the glory with any man, it was Sukre, whom Belivar quite literally loved like a son. And for his part, Sukre went out of his way to not upstage the Liberator and always gave Belivar full credit for the capture of Keto. He had no intention of playing Sulla to Belivar's Marius. And if you don't get that reference, boy, I have a book that will explain it all to you, forthcoming from Public Affairs Press. On June the 16th, 1822, Belivar himself rode into Kito at the head of his

remaining forces and was greeted by thronging crowds of jubilant residents. Zucre himself studiously kept out of the way and deferred all hails of Liberator to Belivar, soothing the general's admittedly fragile ego. Bringing Kito into the Colombian fold was a huge accomplishment, and one that would be celebrated without any hurt feelings amongst the senior commanders. What had been a ludicrous pipe dream back in Angostura in 1817 when they first claimed that all of New Granada would be a part of Grand Columbia was now reality, and Grand Columbia was now whole. For Belivar, the capture of Qaeda was the end of one chapter in his life and the beginning of another,

and not just in terms of his revolutionary career, but also in his personal life. Since the death of Pepita Machado back in 1819, Belivar had been a bachelor. Yes, there had been some drama in Bogota concerning a young woman who Belivar fell for but who did not fall for him back, but other than that, he had been on his own. And that all changed on June the 16th, 1822 because a celebratory ball held the night of his arrival in Quito. Simone Belivar met Manuela Sines, changing both their lives forever. Manuel Sainz was born out of wedlock in Keto in 1797. She was the daughter of a peninsulari merchant and an unmarried Crioia woman. So like Bernardo O'Higgins, Manuel's birth was a scandal.

Deposited in an orphanage that specialized in such cases, the girl was raised in polite obscurity until her mother died when she was six years old. Now, normally this would left her in complete obscurity, all on her own. But to the shock of his family, Manuel's father, decided he was not going to abandon her. So without formally acknowledging paternity, he totally acknowledged paternity. He not only supported her financially, but also routinely brought her around for any family function. So though Manuel was an orphan, she grew to be a comfortable member of the local Creoya Society, though due to the circumstances of her birth,

she would never be completely accepted. So Manuel's peculiar insider, outsider, outside her upbringing, mixed with a naturally precocious personality, to produce a young woman who was smart, self-confident, and did not give a damn about the conservative, social, and political values that had made her an embarrassment and gotten her mother shunned by her family just for the crime of giving Manuel a life. By the time Manuel was a teenager, the wars of Spanish-American independence were raging, and she became a fire-breathing patriot. When she was 17, her father arranged for her to be married to a middle-aged English merchant named James Thorne, who resided in Lima, and who would become Manuel's path out of the shadow of her orphaned childhood.

And though Thorne was, in many ways, for her, a terrible match, he was a dull man of business set in his ways, neither spontaneous, nor looking for a good time, nor looking to upend the political order, but he was in other ways the perfect match. He did not try to contain his young wife's energy, and while he traveled on business, he was happy to let her run the show back in Lima. A good bookkeeper and a persuasive negotiator and now mostly free to run her life as she saw fit, Manuela enjoyed an independent life in bustling Lima. Always a committed patriot. Manuel was thrilled at the arrival of General San Martín in 1821, and she became a fixture

of Patriot Society after the liberation, so much so that San Martin actually gave her a medal for her work supporting the cause. But when news came along a few months later that Kito was about to fall, she hurried back home to see what she could do to protect her father. An old peninsula set in his ways, her father was not going to survive the new South American order without help. With luck, Manuel would be able to shield him from patriotic retribution, which probably meant securing him safe passage back to Europe.

So she arrived in Kito just ahead of Belivar, and at the celebratory ball on June the 13th, 1822, the two laid eyes on each other for the first time. Falling for each other instantly, the 25-year-old Manuela and 38-year-old Belivar embarked on a passionate love affair. And whenever he could get away from official business, they were together. So much so that it would eventually become more convenient to simply mix business and pleasure. And Manuel would become not only his lover, but an active partner in the future campaigns to liberate Peru, and then the project to try to keep Grand Columbia together, as the thunderous canons of war gave way to the silent long knives of politics.

But for the moment, Belivar did not yet realize that he had a partner in Manuela, and within a few weeks of arriving in Quito, Belivar said, I have urgent business in Guayaquil, and I have to leave. And it was urgent business. Belivar had by now traded a further round of correspondence with General San Martín, and it had not been pleasant. The protector of Peru had written the Liberator and said, hey, congratulations for all your success, but don't even think about annexing Guayaquil, to which Belivir had replied, yeah, Guayaquil is totally a part of Colombia, and I'm totally going to annex it. But Belivar did further say, let's not do this by letter. You should come north. We should meet in person,

and one great general to another hash all of this out. So by mid-July, staying in Kito was no longer an option. After extending the invitation to San Martin to come north, Belivar had to get to Guayaquil before San Martín did. So despite the furious protests of Manuel, Belivar rode down to the coast leaving her behind. And next week, Belivar will indeed beat San Martín to Guayaquil, setting up a summit between the two great generals that would see one of them depart the revolutionary stage forever.