The Struggle for Independence, 1810–19
The trigger for the independence movement was the Napoleonic intervention in Spain in 1808 and resultant disarray of the Spanish monarchy. The French forces of Napoléon Bonaparte forced the abdication, first of Charles IV and then of his son and immediate successor, Ferdinand VII, who ended up a captive across the Pyrenees. A Spanish resistance movement arose to fight against the French and the intrusive authorities they imposed, and, with significant British help, it ultimately prevailed, but for some time most of Spain was in the hands of the French and their Spanish collaborators. And when the rump government that claimed to speak for what was left of free Spain—ostensibly in the name of the absent Ferdinand—claimed also to exercise authority over the American colonies, the response in New Granada, as elsewhere, was mixed.
The viceroy in Santa Fe, Antonio Amar y Borbón, sidetracked a first move in 1809 by criollo notables to form a governing junta that would rule in Ferdinand’s name but enjoy virtual autonomy in practice. For their part, the leaders of Spain’s struggle against Napoléon offered Spanish Americans token representation in their Central Junta and then in the Cortes, or Spanish parliament, which they were reviving after years of disuse. However, the Spanish Americans would be a small minority despite a population greater than that of Spain, and the Spanish offer did not diminish the ultimate authority that was to be exercised from Spain over the entire Spanish Empire.
It therefore failed to satisfy the criollo lawyers and bureaucrats who aspired to greater control of their destinies (and higher positions for themselves), and with the future of the mother country itself still uncertain, new moves for local autonomy were inevitable. The year 1810 brought a series of mostly successful efforts to set up American governing juntas: in Caracas on April 19, in Cartagena not long afterward, and finally on July 20 in Santa Fe, where the viceroy was first made a member of the junta but soon was forced out.
Caracas and the rest of Venezuela, which had been little more than nominally subject to the viceroy, would go their own way until Simón Bolívar Palacios, a son of Caracas, combined the independence movements of all northern South America. But neither did the towns and cities of New Granada proper agree to act in unison. The new authorities in Santa Fe, considering themselves natural successors to the viceroy, sought to establish under their leadership a government for the whole of the former colony.
However, Cartagena and most outlying provinces refused to cooperate and in 1811 instead formed the United Provinces of New Granada, a league even weaker than the Articles of Confederation under which the rebellious British American colonies fought the American War of Independence. Insisting on the need for strong central authority, Santa Fe refused to join and instead annexed several adjoining towns and provinces to form the separate state of Cundinamarca, which before long was bogged down in intermittent civil warfare with the United Provinces.
Even so, faced with Spain’s refusal to offer meaningful concessions and bitter denunciation of all the Spanish Americans were doing, New Granada reached the stage of formally declaring independence, doing it piecemeal in the absence of an effective overall government: Cartagena led the way in 1811; Cundinamarca followed in 1813. To complicate matters further, still other parts of New Granada—notably Santa Marta on the coast and Pasto in the extreme south—remained loyal to the authorities in Spain and did their best to harass the revolutionaries.
Traditional historians dubbed the first years of the independence struggle the Patria Boba (Foolish Fatherland), both because of the patriots’ disunity and because provincial legislatures wasted so much time on well-intentioned but impractical innovations. Elaborate declarations of citizens’ rights, more on the French than the American model, are just one example. But a few of the measures were noteworthy: thus Antioquia Province began the process of abolishing slavery with a law of free birth, and Cartagena, which had one of the headquarters of the Spanish Inquisition, closed it down. Moreover, although political disunity was unfortunate, it faithfully reflected the fact that New Granada’s population clusters, isolated by rugged topography and abysmal internal transportation, had really never had much to do with each other.
An outward appearance of unity was finally achieved in November–December 1814, when Bolívar, who owed the United Provinces a debt of gratitude for helping him militarily in Venezuela but was at the time a fugitive in New Granada, assumed command of an army that took Santa Fe and compelled Cundinamarca to join the confederation.
Unfortunately, Ferdinand VII, having been returned to his throne as king of Spain in March 1814, was determined to restore the colonial status quo. Early in 1815, a major expedition of Spanish veterans under General Pablo Morillo set sail for America, landing first on the coast of Venezuela in April to mop up what remained of patriot resistance there. Its next target was New Granada. Correctly diagnosing the patriots’ cause as hopeless because of their continuing dissensions, Bolívar decamped to the West Indies, to prepare for a better day. During August–December, Morillo’s forces besieged Cartagena, starving it into submission, then advanced into the interior, where they restored Spanish rule in Santa Fe in May 1816.
The ease of the Spanish “reconquest” of New Granada in 1815–16 can be attributed not only to patriot divisions but also to weariness with the hardships and disruptions of wartime. Moreover, the pro-independence leadership, mainly drawn from criollo upper sectors of society, had generally failed to convince the popular majority that it had a real stake in the outcome.
Although one patriot faction at Cartagena had succeeded in rallying artisans and people of color to participate actively on its side, more aristocratic rivals won local control, not only in Cartagena but also in all of the more populated regions of New Granada by July 1816. Yet restoration of the old regime was never complete. Some patriot fighters followed Bolívar into Caribbean exile to continue plotting, and others—including the man destined to become Bolívar’s closest New Granadan collaborator and ultimate rival, General Francisco de Paula Santander y Omaña—retreated to the eastern plains (llanos), which became a republican sanctuary. Moreover, the financial exactions of the Spanish authorities together with revulsion against their tactics of repression, which included systematic execution of most top figures of the Patria Boba, turned feeling increasingly against them. Patriot guerrillas sprang up in many parts of the highlands.
Definitive liberation came from the direction of Venezuela under the leadership of Bolívar, who, by October 1817, had returned from the West Indies and occupied most of the Orinoco basin, an area encompassing one-fourth of Colombia and four-fifths of Venezuela. However, Bolívar had little success against Spanish units entrenched in Caracas and the Venezuelan Andes. In mid-1819, he therefore turned west toward New Granada, joined forces with Santander and other New Granadans who had taken refuge on the plains, and invaded the central highlands over one of the most difficult of Andean paths.
On August 7, he defeated the Spanish in the Battle of Boyacá, which freed central New Granada, and three days later he entered Santa Fe, soon renamed Santa Fe de Bogotá. The battle had involved little more than 2,000 men on either side and was of short duration, but it destroyed the main Spanish force in New Granada and sorely damaged royalist morale. By the end of the year, patriot columns fanned out and occupied most of the rest of New Granada except the Caribbean coast and far southwest. Bolívar organized a provisional patriot government at Bogotá, naming Santander to head it.
Then, in December 1819, he was in Angostura (present-day Ciudad Bolívar), temporary capital of patriot Venezuela, where at his behest the Venezuelan Congress (with the addition of a few New Granadan members) proclaimed the creation of the Republic of Great Colombia, comprising all the former Viceroyalty of New Granada.
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