San Martin and Bolivar

On the morning of July 25, 1822, the schooner “Macedonia,” proceeding from Callao, rounded the wooded isle of Puna just south of the equator and came to rest in the harbor of Guayaquil. It flew the flag of General Jose de San Martin. At the same hour, Simon Bolivar was signing his name to a letter in reply to one which San Martin had despatched to him from Lima.

“Friend,” he wrote, “with deepest satisfaction I give you this title which my heart has always given you. Your failure to come to me in this city would hurt me like the loss of many battles, but you will not disappoint my eagerness to greet on Colombian soil the first friend of myself and my nation.”

The following day, having received the delegation of Bolivar in his cabin, San Martin, creator and General of the Argentine Army of the Andes, liberator of Chile and half Peru, dictator in Lima, disembarked. Battalions of the north, fresh from the victories of Boyaca, Carabobo, Bombona, Pichincha, lined the clamorous streets. San Martin, in the simple uniform of a general of the Provinces of El Plata, rode to the residence selected for him. At the door to welcome him stood Bolivar, clad in the full regalia of his honors as Liberator of Venezuela, New Granada, and Quito. The two men embraced and walked up the stairs into the house together.

I

San Martin, at this interview which directed the fate of America Hispana, was forty-four years old. Ten years before, having resigned his colonelcy in the Spanish army, he offered his sword to the young nation of El Plata to which he belonged by birth. The Republic sent him north to aid Belgrano in the campaigns against the royalists who held High Peru (then the Audiencia of Charcas and part of the Virreinato of Buenos Aires). The war was a ceaseless pendulum. When the royalists, inured to the mountains, came down to the pampa, the gauchos whipped them. But when the plainsmen followed up into the Andes, the mountain royalists turned and hurled them back. San Martin on the field soon saw the futility of this frontal warfare. He asked to be released from his commission and to be made governor of the obscure province of Cuy.o, in the eastern shadow of the Andes. At Mendoza, the capital of Cuyo, San Martin spent three inconspicuous years. Before he came he had known what he wanted to do, and he proceeded to do it. He formed an army. Never in the Americas had there been so precise an instrument of military will. This army, at a given moment, was to cross the terrible glaciers of the Andes, fall on the Spaniards in Chile, destroy them, and sail north, flanking the royalists in Peru.

At last the Argentine Congress stopped sneering at San Martin and gave him the authority to proceed. In order to win it, he had to invent an imaginative threat of invasion by the royalists from Chile. With clockwork exactitude, the military machine crawled accross the enormous continental backbone. San Martin had spread among the Indians the secret news that he was dividing his troops and would come into Chile by two passes. The royalists in time learned the misinformation and split to meet the Army of the Andes at both terminals. San Martin with his entire force came upon one division at Chacabuco and destroyed it; proceeded south and broke the rest of the Spaniards at Maipu. He entered Santiago, declared the independence of Chile, refused the civil rule which he bestowed on his friend the Chilean, O’Higgins; and proceeded to the next stage of his plan. . . . With Chile’s navy to support him, he sails for Pisco on the coast of south Peru with a picked army of four thousand veterans of the Army of the Andes. Twenty-three thousand Spanish regulars face him. He holds his ground. Gradually, by propaganda, he sweeps the citizenry of south Peru into a revolutionary fervor. The royalists are forced to retreat into the Andes; San Martin marches into Lima.

San Martin has proceeded from the wealthy and sure provinces of El Plata. Although the government in Buenos Aires repudiates his continental action, that action has devolved upon a national base, prosperous and independent. From it he has moved across the Andes to the Pacific, and north through half a continent to Lima. Bolivar meantime has proceeded from an idea and a passion, not at all from the base of a freed nation. The armies of Spain have overwhelmed the revolts of the north, in Caracas and Bogota. Miranda, the Precursor, is dead in a prison in Spain; Bolivar has escaped with his bare life. Revolutionist without horse or troop, he has spent his days in Jamaica sketching an almost perfect portrait of the future Hispanic states and a constitution for the future Colombian Republic. He goes to Margarita, an island north of Caracas, gathers a few llaneros and lands on the delta of the Orinoco. He pushes to Angostura, an insignificant town on the swamps of the river, and here he calls a Congress. All Venezuela, except the marshes in which he stands, is under Spain; all New Granada, all Quito. Yet he summons his Congress, yet he creates the republic of Colombia, whose limits are to be Costa Rica, Brazil, and Peru. He establishes the laws of his nation, frees its slaves, accepts the presidency of a republic not yet in existence and places his capital in Bogota, although a thousand miles of plain and mountain—all solid royalist possession—intervene between them.

The Spaniards nearest him in Caracas smilingly wait his attack, confident that they will destroy him as they, have done two times before. But Bolivar has come into his own.

He ignores Caracas and aims his army across the Andes for Bogota. His soldiers are llaneros, the gauchos of the plains of Venezuela. They are at home in the vast tropic lowlands where they can give rein to their horses. Bolivar marshals them into a compact legion and pushes them to heights where the air is cold and thin, and where their horses die. He does not, like San Martin, train his men; he transfigures them; he is a llanero himself and his miraculous spirit makes a plain of the Andes. His army survives the forest and the heights: suddenly it appears like a revelation in the rich valley of Cundinamarca. The Spaniards, lazily awaiting news of Bolivar’s defeat before Caracas a thousand miles to the east, are destroyed by a band which has crossed the fire and ice of a continent to find them. Bolivar enters his capital, Bogota; he does not rest there. Now he turns back toward the northeast. With recruits of New Granada, he falls on the rear of the Spaniards of Caracas and hurls them into the eastern swamps whence they were expecting him to march.

The two continental forces, one embodied by San Martin of Argentina moving west and north, one by Bolivar of Venezuela moving west and south, converge upon Peru. Indispensable to each other, they have exchanged no signals. The common land, the common foe, the common culture, and the common aim have sufficed to move them in a continental pattern. Their exact harmonious advance is a continent’s and a people’s primitive articulation. But now the larval period is over, and Spain still holds the heart of the Andes. To dislodge Spain and to permit the new states to begin to breathe, the continental forces must meet, know each other, and unite.

II

San Martin is a man of strategy and order; social chaos is to him a disease to be destroyed. He is ill at ease in Lima. The inherited pomp of the viceregal court, the sensual women, all the gracious forms of intrigue, are distasteful to him. He is a worker, not an emperor. The perfumed indirections of Peru have clogged his capacities. He sees too clearly the impotence which a disordered freedom must bring to the American people: he has no mystic eye for the pregnancies of chaos. Only when he looks north toward Bolivar does his heart again beat gladly. He acknowledges (perhaps he is wrong) the Venezuelan’s superior military genius. He sees the perfect facade of the Colombian state which Bolivar has constructed. That is why he lent his battalions without a thought of the necessity of making terms; why he set sail for Guayaquil with a boy’s eagerness and a boy’s faith. Bolivar and he would understand each other! They would pool their wisdom and their forces, they would save the America they were freeing!

Bolivar has come to no such zenith and to no such pause. He is a force in full trajectory. He is a poet who has cleared at last the obstacles to composition, and whose inspired words are flowing. The soldier in the man is incidental; before he had won a battle, he had prophesied the contour and traits of the Hispanic nations. The statesman is subordinate; before he had conquered his Colombia he had given it a constitution, and before the Spaniards were gone he was planning continental congresses in Panama. The statesman works a posteriori; the poet only, and the seer, works a priori. Bolivar’s departure was an idea, and to flesh it he carried out his marvelous campaigns, joined provinces, carved new republics, assumed the powers of a dictator.

He is a romantic poet. The impulse for discovery and creation which was making men in France and Germany break rules of classic drama, the traditions of syntax, the “forms” of literature and morals, made Bolivar break the Andes. With pride, he looks down on Napoleon, whom he worshiped as an adolescent: the “imitative man” who had not known better than the old way of crowning himself Emperor. He would be something more original; the liberator of a continental people. And it is perfectly clear from his letters, that Bolivar did not mean by “liberation” the banal striking off of political chains. Bolivar feels the pregnancy of the American world . . . the Indian, the Negro, the mestizo, the forest and the mountain are, for him, a drama of birth. He envisages the emergence, from this ethnic and continental plasm, of a new race. And when he said that he would rather be liberator than Caesar, he meant that he would free these turbulent potencies, deliver them to themselves, in order that they might come at last to birth.

He feels his problem as a romantic poet. He can not see the features of his creation, all he can do is to clear the way for its coming, and to guide it as it comes. And like the romantic poet, he enjoys the process. He loves the scenes of his own art. The pomp and rhetoric and lust of conquest are sweet to him. He loves the smoke of battle, the sweat of horses, the clamor of the populace as he marches in triumph through a city. He loves the managing of men, the making of captains, the launching of diplomats on sonorous missions, the chess-like intrigue of governance in cabinet or congress. He loves the power to condemn, the power to pardon. He loves his own voice rising in cadence, the glint of eyes and the gape of mouths as his rhetoric descends. He loves the languors of fatigue: the red meat, the red wine, the waters of the perfumed bath. He loves music and dance. He loves the mouths of women, the swoon of their flesh as the arms of a conqueror embrace them.

He is vain and too proud to hide his vanity. He is sensual and too proud to repress his hungers. But the same sense that quickens him when he sees a lovely woman transfigures him when he looks upon the Andes and the plains and mighty rivers of his world. He sees the maize and the Indian, no less mellow, rising from the maize. He sees the dark trees and the Negro, no less profound, moving within the shadow of forgotten forests. He loves the world . . . the American world. He feels in his own nervous hands the body of a continent hungering to give forth life . . .

life of a new world . . . through the seed of his embrace.

He is a son of Spain. He fights and hates Spain so well, because its genius is huge within him. He would be Spain, be its unitary, passion, its concrete act of immanent spirit: not brook the dessicated Spain of State across the sea which would bind his world in rote of imitation. The conquistador is in him, blind to obstacles though they be high as the Andes, and the mystic of Spain’s great century who takes for his Cross the world and bears it miraculously through the ocean. But the Spaniard is transformed by the America where for two hundred years his fathers lived. The American will to forge its aboriginal past and creole present into an American future turns this Spaniard not alone from Spain, but from the Catholic heaven. American soil allows no heaven; its miracles and its salvation must rise from earth and must remain on earth: its gods like the sun must be of the earth substance.

In his psychologic traits Bolivar is mestizo, since in him two worlds embrace. But whereas, in the average mestizo, the conflicting wills annul each other, making for inertia and confusion, in Bolivar each separate element is enhanced by combination. More Spaniard than the Spanish in his power to live a dominant ideal and raise it to cosmic pitch, he is more American than the Indian in his love of the soil and gods of the American world.

III

Bolivar has introduced his generals to his guest and they have left the room. The two, alone, stand and face each other. Bolivar sees a tall and slender man, muscular, poised, a little rigid. The long pale face beneath the short-cropped hair, the black eyes, the high arched nose, bespeak a lordly will. There is no sensuousness in the hard mouth nor in the heavy voice. Weariness of nerve and intelligent cunning mask his open gaze. San Martin sees before him a short man, narrow-chested, delicate of body. The head is large. The irregular features are the form of moods forever changing: tenderness and cruelty are close, intuitive sympathy hides behind reticence. The nose is salient, the mouth generous and full of hungers. The chin, although sharp, has the contour of a woman’s. Even the voluptuous lips are contradicted by, their rigor. But the uneven features are fused to harmony by a constant radiance of spirit. The whole head is dynamic; and its glow is tempered by a silence in the eyes—a silence that remains, denying the words and deeds of the man with its prophetic sadness and its resignation.

San Martin, looking upon Bolivar, knows him as an adversary and that he is beaten. Here are profundities and surprises which the conqueror of Chile cannot fathom. He knows that he has come into this battle, not aware of the terrain, not guessing the resources of the opponent. And he knows it is a battle. Bolivar, he instantly perceives, is a man who can be no man’s ally. Yet there is a presence in the room, within Bolivar, which makes his presentiment of failure not alone bearable but sweet. “I have fought for America’s freedom.” Is it possible that San Martin has fought, more deeply, for Bolivar? Has he been, these years of his imperious success, the unconscious subaltern of this man of genius? Why, except for some such mystery as this, does he feel the submission in his blood not as an unnatural disease but as a deep fruition? Why does he feel that he loves Bolivar, as one loves whom one has served? The cool mind of San Martin has no receiving form for mystery. No words can bring into his consciousness these stirrings of his nerves. He has come to discuss specific problems; let him forget the wordless premonitions and discuss them.

The problems are three: the disposition of Guayaquil, which Colombia covets as a part of Quito, while the townsmen lean toward casting their lot with Peru; a plan for Bolivar’s army to come down and with San Martin’s forces give the coup de grace to the Spaniards in the Peruvian Andes; most urgent of all, the thrashing out by these two creators of American independence of a political program which will bring health to the young nations. But the first of these questions is already settled. Bolivar has settled it. He has marched into Guayaquil with a battalion; he has issued one of his resounding proclamations welcoming the citizens into his Republic; he has sent a quiet word to the Municipal Council warning them to accept their inevitable (and glorious) fate. And he has welcomed San Martin officially in Guayaquil to “Colombian soil.” San Martin decides to waste no words on a problem already solved by the event. After all, conquest and provinces do not primarily concern him. He represents Peru, which has legal claims on Guayaquil, but his mind tells him that the town belongs to Quito: without its seaport Quito is stifled, without its hinterland Guayaquil is starved . . . and Quito is part of Colombia already.

They begin with the second matter, both still standing.

“I offer you three battalions,” says Bolivar. It is the precise payment of San Martin’s debt, since three battalions had gone north from Peru to help Sucre at Pichincha.

“It is not enough,” San Martin answers. And very carefully he explains. Practically the whole royalist army is in the highlands above Lima. To superiority of numbers they add enormous superiority of position. It would be unsafe to advance into the Andes without defending the coast and Lima itself against a flank attack. The Spaniards cannot reconquer their possessions; the fate of America is sealed; but they can draw out, almost indefinitely, a harrying campaign. Their continued presence in the Andes demoralizes the American peoples, prevents them from getting down to the problems of political and economic stabilization, keeps Europe from recognizing American independence.

“General, there must be no delay. We must get rid of the last army of Spain, lest anarchy in Peru accomplish what these armies directly could not do. Our full force must march. Three battalions is nothing. Your territory, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, has been swept clear. You must come down yourself, with every soldier you can spare.”

The eyes of Bolivar are veiled. He says:

“I have no authority from my Congress at Bogotd to leave Colombian soil.”

San Martin faces him sternly . . . the President of Colombia, the dictator.

“General,” he softly says, “I make no doubt, if you represent the actual conditions to your Congress, that it will grant you the privilege to complete your own work.”

Bolivar shakes his head. “There are difficulties. And surely,” his voice regains its volume, “surely, you underestimate your own powers.”

San Martin precisely lays the problem before him. Bolivar is too good a soldier to deny the conclusion. Security demands not three battalions but a Colombian army. Now suddenly and softly come these words from San Martin:

“It will be an honor for me, General, to serve as your second. Come to Peru and I will be your lieutenant.”

Bolivar throws up his hands. He evades the eyes of the other. He knows if he meets them that he will see in them a sincerity which he can not admit, since it would call forth sincerity from him. He is afraid that San Martin will see in him depths of prevision which he himself is not ready, to explain. He protests: “delicacy would prevent him” . . . “San Martin can serve under no one!” etc. The General from the South insists. And then suddenly he is aware that Bolivar will have none of him, because of reasons which he has not spoken. He insists no more. Now he sees the surface of Bolivar clear, the outward force of his will. The Liberator must be alone. So long as San Martin is present in Peru, the Colombian army will not march and the Spaniards will remain.

There is a silence. Bolivar puts out his hand; San Martin accompanies him through the hall to the street door. The interview is over, and nothing has really been discussed, yet the second problem, like the first, has been decided. San Martin knows that Bolivar wants to destroy the Spaniards in Peru. And San Martin knows how he will have to act, how he will want to act.

In the afternoon of the same day, San Martin formally returns the visit. He remains a half hour.

“Tomorrow,” he says, “we shall meet again for a last conference. And the same night, I shall sail for Lima.”

IV

This time the two men take seats, and again all doors are shut. The third problem, the political fate of the new nations, is before them.

“Ideals can be dangers,” says San Martin. “An ideal form of government can not be successfully willed upon a people.” He is deliberately calm, and to himself the strange truth comes that he is pleading. Pleading to this man who is not yet forty, and who, in office and in deed, is not his superior but his equal. Yet no anger or dismay mars the recognition. Only a sadness, like a reflection of the future softens his words, as if he were enacting the quiet early scene of a drama whose tragic end he saw already.

“Yes, the republic is the ideal form,” he says. “It rises organically from the will of a close-knit, tranquil nation. Its technique of action is the peaceful creating and spreading of public opinion by a ruling class in accord with all the other classes. A common language, a common religion, economic mutuality, literacy, accessibility of place, the sense of common enterprise, and a strong middle class in control of the economic life and in contact with the masses—are the prerequisites of the republic. Some of the cities of Greece possessed them, the homogeneous United States of North America possess them. Compact, commercially harmonious countries like Switzerland, France, even England, possess these prerequisites of the republic. We have none of them. Absolutely none.” “I know it.”

“Of course you know it. Yet I repeat it, although I tell you nothing new. Our countries are vast wildernesses, it takes weeks and months to traverse them. In some parts live Indians with their own deep-rooted cultures, in other parts live Creoles. There are no possible means of communication between these alien cultures; there is no common enterprise to communicate. Our ruling group is not a middle class, it is feudal. It has recognized only two loyalties in the past, a Court and a Church. It cannot suddenly change its nature. Only a Court founded on the common Catholic religion can bind this ruling class together and keep it in its place and serve to spread loyalty and control throughout the masses.”

Bolivar is gazing on the floor. He looks up.

“Why have we freed America?” he asks.

“Surely not to plunge it into chaos! A liberal monarchy under the support of the ruling classes would bring order, dispel personal ambitions, preserve the hierarchies, encourage economic growth and the arts. . . .”

Bolivar is silent again.

“We have freed America, surely, for ourselves,” says San Martin. “So that the Americans may have peace . . . happiness.” . . . Bolivar has risen.

“General,” he says, “you are wrong. I care nothing for peace. I know no happiness. Do they exist? Do you think I have permitted the death of thousands, the burning of cities, the raping of women, the starving of children, for a happiness in whose existence I do not believe? for a peace which was infinitely surer under Spain?”

San Martin rises also.

“I am not afraid of chaos,” says Bolivar. “I foresee it. The chaos is here—here in my heart. I do not want it. But since it must be, I accept it. I shall not fear it.” “It need not be.”

“No. You are right. We can ensure ourselves against it. Having driven out the rule of Spain, we can set up Spanish states to replace it.”

“That is not what I propose. I propose monarchies, liberal and constitutional, fashioned after that of England, with North American laws.”

“We are not North America, we are not England. Monarchy in our nations, as you have said, would be feudal. It would rely, on a feudal caste, it would make feudal serfs of the Indian and the Negro. It would change nothing. American kings instead of a Spaniard—is that what we have fought for?”

“Then you have fought for chaos?”

“Yes. Have it so. I have fought, perhaps, for chaos.”

“The name of a king frightens you, though it bring order. The name of a republic soothes you, though it bring anarchy.”

“There is much in a name. A name is an ideal. A name calls our vision close; and we repeat it, hold it ever-present. All growth is in a name, all that is human. Animals have no names.”

“Chaos and anarchy—these will be the facts you so splendidly name republics.”

“The name will outlast the anarchy and chaos. The reality of the name (being the true will of the people) will rise from the disorder. I care nothing for republics. The form of the republic alone is possible for us. But this form will be the threshold to a human freedom and a human potentiality which no republic as yet has ever dared to approach. You are wrong, General. The name of the republic does not soothe me, it frightens me. I too know our America, and love it. I see the nameless things—bloodshed, tyranny, treason—which the name of the republic will call out from the depths. The nameless things! We must go through this dreaded passage, to find our future. The republic is only the opening door. Do you not see? What we go toward, through the republic, is also nameless—it is unborn America.”

“I see, General, our duty, as guardians of an infant people.”

“Let them be infants! Could the child mature, if he were prevented from living the child’s life, and if he were not made constantly aware that his heritage is manhood? A people under a monarchy may be well nursed—and perpetually condemned to childhood.”

Now Bolivar’s voice has deepened as if he were talking to himself.

“We shall not see, nor the generation after us, the America we are founding. This world we are in is not even a child, it is a chrysalis. There will be a metamorphosis of the physical life; there will come finally a recasting of all the races, which will result in the unity of the people.”

San Martin, carried beyond his vision, says nothing.

“Such a metamorphosis must be preceded by transition. And transition is agony. Perhaps a hundred years of chaos are before us. We shall go down in it, my friend; have no doubt of that. The monarchic order you would impose would save us. It would protect America from chaos—the chaos of birth.”

For nearly five hours they, have been together. Their words, from time to time, have risen and with them the men have risen from their seats, then subsided. They are, after all, young men, these two in whom a continental destiny is lodged. They have spoken passionately, the reticence of both has burned away. They are two men on different slopes of the spiritual world; although they have worked in harmony they cannot see each other. San Martin belongs to an old descending order. He has words—hierarchy, class, authority, peace, law—which he has learned in Europe. He would transplant them now, with their old meanings, to American soil. Bolivar, standing at the bottom of a slope which rises into the mist of the American tomorrow, has no words. His words are helpless and outmoded, only his tragic march upon the future can bespeak him. He has no means to rationalize his plunging of the peoples into chaos. And he suffers from this wordlessness of his vision; that is why he compensates with rhetoric and romantic schemes and gestures. Oh, the longing for the comfort of words in a man who has invaded the silence of the future! There are moments, and they will crowd to become the norm of his life, when the word-clarity of San Martin seems balm and sanity to Bolivar; when his own march up the slope of destiny seems madness. “I have ploughed the sea,” he will cry. But he will not turn back,

The first step was joyous: the broken campaigns in Venezuela and New Granada, the escape to the Islands, the marshalling of a handful of llaneros, the Congress of Angostura, the assault of the Andes, the sweeping of the Spaniards from the whole continental north, Panama to Quito—this all his first step; and he has made it like a child, laughing and careless. Now, destiny has clasped him, and he must proceed. And as he goes, the prophecy of San Martin grows real. Chaos will spread; tyranny, treachery, will make an unclean havoc of his plans. And cast him out at last bloodless upon the Atlantic coast where he began.

The third problem for which they came together has also, tacitly, been decided. . . .

The doors are opened, it is time for the great banquet. Surrounded by officers and ladies who have come all the way from Quito to do him honor, San Martin eats frugally of the rich meats, sips the two glasses of wine which his regimen allows. Bolivar dines heavily, drinks deep. The moment for the toasts has come. A little unsteady, Bolivar rises:

“To the two great men of South America: General San Martin and I.” San Martin is bewildered. This vainglorious, half-drunken toast — is it, as he suspects, the subtlest irony? He rises quietly, and responds:

“To the prompt conclusion of the War. To the organization of the various republics. To the health of the Liberator of Colombia.”

His toast is a promise. Bolivar has understood it.

The banquet is followed by a ball. The lovely women unfold with the acridly wild music. Bolivar, dancing, savors their self-bestowal. A sensual pulse thickens the air of the hall. San Martin whispers to his aide-de-camp: “Let us go, I cannot bear this.” He has already said farewell to his host. He slips through a side door, and with the hour the “Macedonia” sails south.

V

On the day of San Martin’s arrival in Guayaquil, there has been revolution in Lima. Monteagudo whom he has appointed to replace him in his absence is imprisoned and sent into exile. The city welcomes its Protector back, as if to say: “No one can keep us in order but yourself.”

But San Martin at once convokes the first Constituent Congress of Peru; he tenders his resignation from both the civil and the military power. “If my services to the American cause are worthy of consideration by this Congress, I mention them today, only to ask as my remuneration, that there be no one who votes for my continuance in office.”

He writes Bolivar a letter made public many years after the death of them both. In it, he regrets that the Liberator either did not sense the sincerity of his offer to serve as his lieutenant or was averse from accepting for personal reasons. He reiterates the needs of an immediate army, carefully detailing the strength and position of the Spaniards. And he announces his own resignation. “I do not doubt that once I have disappeared from Peru, the new Government will call on you for active cooperation; and I think you will be unable to refuse its just demand. I have spoken to you frankly, but the thoughts of this letter must be kept hidden. Were they to be known, the enemies of American freedom would use them to its hurt; intrigue and ambition would soon sow discord with them.”

He kept his word with the despatch of a soldier. While the best elements of Peru reviled him for deserting his post when the task was half completed, he silently set sail for Chile. The Government of his friend Bernardo O’Higgins was on the point of falling, and San Martin was received with malevolence by the nation he had created. He crossed to Mendoza: Argentina took no official notice of his coming. He had won the Andes and broken Spain, but he had disobeyed congressional orders. His wife, whom he had left seven years before in Buenos Aires, was dead. With his daughter, San Martin sailed for Europe, there to live out his exile, in penury and isolation, for nearly thirty years.

Bolivar had understood that his will had been accepted. First he sent Sucre into Peru, and within the year himself was in Lima. With perfect care, he and his greatest general planned the ultimate campaign; two years and a half after the interview of Guayaquil, they finally crushed the Spaniards at Ayacucho.

Charcas, last royal stronghold, became Bolivia. Bolivar planned his Federation of the Andes. He looked toward Panama, Cuba, Argentina—even Brazil. But while Quito and Guayaquil were ratifying the Bolivarian Union, Paez, captain of the llaneros of Venezuela, where Bolivar had begun his journey, was plotting separation from Colombia. Peru and Bolivia deposed their life presidents elected under Bolivar’s plan, and marched against each other. Quito became Ecuador. Sucre was murdered. Bolivar, reviled and dying, fled from Bogota. The chaos had come. . . .